The unnerving trend of mobile spam proliferation has found its way to WhatsApp in no short supply.
The latest research from AdaptiveMobile shows an alarming rate of spam targeting the hugely popular mobile messaging platform, particularly across Europe and India.
In effect, the spam explosion comes as the latest evidence of spammers moving away from SMS to concentrate on OTT (Over-The-Top) messaging platforms.
“The total scale of these individual spam attacks over WhatsApp is hard to tell, but if anything, it does seem clear that WhatsApp is joining the ranks of messaging systems which now have a functioning and active spam ecosystem, and the contributors to this spam are being affected by and coming from other messaging systems,” the report, highlighted by ThreatPost, reads.
Unfortunately, things have gotten so bad in India, for example, that WhatsApp is said to be “overrun” with spam there. And while the problem may get worse (in the short term) before getting better in the long run, WhatsApp is by no means taking this matter lightly.
With its worldwide popularity surging, WhatsApp recently announced end-to-end encryption for its Android app, a reality made possible by the November 2014 coupling of WhatsApp with Whisper Systems, a “secure text and mobile OS vendor.”
Quoted by ThreatPost, Open Whisper Systems says: “WhatsApp runs on an incredible number of mobile platforms, so full deployment will be an incremental process as we add TextSecure protocol support into each WhatsApp client platform. We have a ways to go until all mobile platforms are fully supported, but we are moving quickly towards a world where all WhatsApp users will get end-to-end encryption by default.”
