WhatsApp pranksters cause frenzy with hidden msgs

Hyderabad: Several WhatsApp users in the city went into a panic last week as unknown pranksters found a way to make the popular messaging app freeze via a message bearing a ‘black dot emoji’, with an accompanying message saying, “Don't touch here”, which piqued the curiosity of several users.

Abhishek Madan, a techie, said, “During festivals, we often see messages like this, which redirect us to a webpage with moving celebratory images and so on. Many naturally assumed that this message was the same and were shocked when their screens froze. The trouble was seen mainly in android phones, with a pop-up stating that WhatsApp wasn’t responding and if the user would like to close the app or wait.”

Since no loss of data has been reported, the prank was probably not staged by a hacker, though many users panicked and restarted their phones, causing loss of data. Cyber-security expert Rakesh Roshan said, “All that was required was for one to close the app, but many people got scared that it would cause spamming. A similar issue occurs on Facebook, when people click on a link and obscene images or links are shared from their profiles. So to quickly ensure that nothing of that sport happened, many people restarted their phones and since many hadn't saved the work they were doing, it led to loss of data. We received a lot of calls asking for ways to recover the data.”

Such mischievous messages have special hidden characters written using normal text and emojis, which makes them difficult to identify as spam. The misleading message has also caused a few IOS based smartphones to crash. “The storage capacity of the phone, how many apps are running and many other factors will determine if a phone will crash. What users should look out for is that these messages will have 'spaces' between characters and letters, which is where the special characters will be hidden. In light of all these messages doing the rounds, one should also not open unidentified messages,” said Rakesh.

More spam messages have been noticed floating around popular messaging platforms. Earlier this year, a single character in Telugu had caused iPhones to crash, which required an update by WhatsApp to fix the bug.