In recent years, several situations have arisen in which it has been possible to make WhatsApp or a mobile completely hang on iOS and Android.
Although it is more common to see this type of failure in iOS and iMessage, now there have been several in iOS and Android that hang the application and prevent us from using it, which can cause us to lose our chats.
These types of messages have a common mechanic, where a message containing strange characters is sent.
Although WhatsApp can recognize some of those characters, there are combinations that make the application unable to read them, and consequently, a chain of infinite hangs is started.
Infinite hangs: a failure for 3 years in WhatsApp
These infinite crashes mean that, once the first WhatsApp crash is generated when a message is received, it is played again when the application is opened and it tries to reload the message with the modified characters.
The official WhatsApp application does not have any mechanism to protect itself against the reception of these characters. Curiously, there are modified WhatsApp applications, such as WhatsApp Plus, that integrate the so-called "Crashcode protection", through which they integrate a larger Unicode database.
Thanks to this, they can recognize more characters and it is more difficult to make those hang. However, using these modified apps can get your account banned, and encryption in the messages is not guaranteed.
On platforms like Facebook, there are groups where users share these codes to upload applications. The groups have codes designed specifically for certain platforms, where some focus on Android and others on iOS.
Brazil, one of the countries most affected by this "fashion"
Since the beginning of August, a "fashion" has emerged in Brazil, where WhatsApp is very popular, in which malicious codes are being sent in a massive way, with names like Travar, Binario, Contact bomb, TravaZap, or Crashers.
One of the main methods used is to use contact cards or vCards. If you open one of them, you will find more than 100 contacts associated with very long names and complex characters that make the app hang.
Sometimes a charge is included to make the situation even worse, including other viruses by WhatsApp.
To avoid crashes, it is recommended, before opening the message, block and delete the chat from WhatsApp Web, where the vulnerability does not work.
If instead we have already opened the malicious message or the contact card, and the application is crashing, we will have no choice but to reinstall WhatsApp and lose all the messages that we have sent and received since the last backup.
The problem has been present in WhatsApp for three years now, and the platform does nothing to fix it.
The only option we have to avoid it is to block the fact that strangers speak to us, although we may lose contact with many people whose number we do not have in our agenda, in addition to that this does not exempt us from having a contact that we already have in the mobile phone can send us malicious code to annoy us.
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