Warning: reading this WhatsApp message will lock your phone instantly



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If you are one of the two billionish) people all over the world who depend on WhatsApp to keep in touch with friends and family should be aware of a new “lock code” that is circulating online. As the name suggests, this code causes your chat app to crash indefinitely, and the only solution to resetting your beloved group conversations and chats seems to be delete and reinstalling WhatsApp. Oh!

The “lock code” was discovered by smart people in @WABetaInfo, who often spend their time crawling through the latest beta code to find clues about unannounced features reaching the world’s most popular messenger. He explained: “A contact can send a message that contains many strange characters. If you read them completely, they don’t make sense, but WhatsApp might interpret the message incorrectly.

“Sometimes WhatsApp cannot process the message in its entirety either, because its structure is very strange: the combination of these characters creates a situation in which WhatsApp cannot process the message, which determines an infinite block. Infinite crash means that when you open WhatsApp it freezes and crashes. If you try to open the app again, it still crashes. “

With several reports of the code already being widely shared in Brazil, WhatsApp users should be on the lookout for messages with the code condemning the application.

The “lock code” is incredibly similar to the one that affected iMessage users earlier this year. Fortunately, unlike the code that made iMessage go crazy, there is a way to protect yourself from friends who think you are “funny” by sending the code to your smartphone.

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According to Ray Walsh, digital privacy expert at ProPrivacy: “To help protect themselves, all WhatsApp users must go into their settings to change ‘Who can add me to groups’ from ‘Everyone’ to ‘My contacts’, as this will reduce the risk of being added to a group used to convey the malicious message.

“Anyone who discovers that they have received a message containing a long string of random characters is advised to log into WhatsApp Web to block the sender, delete the message, and change their group’s privacy settings to“ My Contacts ”or “My contacts except. . “This should allow anyone suffering from a blocked WhatsApp mobile app to reinstall it and fix the problem.”

I have it?

Hopefully your contacts are mature enough not to try to completely destroy your WhatsApp remotely by pinging the code, which we posted here, just in case, but it’s good to know that there is something you need to do to protect yourself. We’d bet WhatsApp is also working on a more permanent fix for the “lock code.”



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