WhatsApp DDoS?
Why are Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram down? Right now, as I type this, the biggest social outage in history is going down! Facebook Inc and its associated brands such as Instagram, Oculus and WhatsApp all went down worldwide on Monday the 4th of October 2021 at around 17h30 SAST (UTC+02:00).
What is a DDoS attack? Distributed denial of service. In not so technical terms, this is when a hacker overloads a server with fake site "visitors", collapsing the servers that are running the website traffic. Servers are only able to handle a certain amount of web traffic at a time before either failing or pushing visitors to another server. A DDoS attack ensures all the affected servers get swarmed with visitors, causing the website to be continuously overwhelmed with traffic and fail to work. I suspect this attack has been widely spread amongst many of their servers. 503 is the error code for a busy or overloaded server.
Whose face do we book on it?
After digging and following the outage as it happened, I found that only businesses associated with Facebook Inc have been highly affected.
I find this interesting, as since WhatsApp's latest update, where they introduced the ability to link WhatsApp mobile accounts to the web version without the mobile device even having to be in the vicinity of the web app, there have been some huge security breaches. I have heard of several occasions in the past 3 weeks where people have found that their WhatsApp has been hacked by people they do not know in countries they do not reside in.
After assessing a few cases I found that the hack was potentially coming from this new update. I wonder if WhatsApp's software developers picked this up, as I feel this could be a way in. Understand that VERY SENSITIVE INFORMATION that is of no use to us, but of great use to hackers, is passed through these networks, such as discussions on API codes, special passwords to servers etc. I can't help but think that this could be a direct effect of their own security flaws in this last update.
Whatever it is, it's going to be one to remember, with the total amount of downtime being almost 7 hours on all their affiliated online brands. What kind of impact will this have in the end? Is our data truly safe now? While the outage should be of no harm to us or our personal accounts, it still leaves any sane person to question the vulnerability we put ourselves in daily by the information we share on these networks. Read more below on how to keep your device safe and ensure your WhatsApp is not being hacked due to this new update.
Instasafe
I'd like to share a tip on how to ensure you are not being hacked and your WhatsApp is not connected elsewhere, so you don't become a victim of cyber crime. Please do the following in WhatsApp on your mobile device:
- Open WhatsApp "Settings".
- Tap "Linked Devices".
- Here you will see a list of devices that your WhatsApp is connected to.
Please ensure you recognise all the devices listed in this area. I also suggest looking at the activity times should you be concerned someone is monitoring you through your own devices. I suggest doing this once or twice a week, until such a time as we are certain this security breach has been resolved by the Facebook Inc team.
Any questions on your business's security and software? Email info@blogaboutbusiness.online.
UPDATE: After 7 hours of no server access, Facebook Inc has regained access to their servers. Facebook was the first to come back online, followed by Oculus and Instagram, and then slowly, throughout the world, the servers were recovered for WhatsApp. Messages were slow in reaching the recipients, I imagine from the influx of messages that had been sitting on the servers unable to go through. Almost everything seems to be back to normal, about an hour after the servers were opened. I am very curious to see what their official statement on the matter will be.