Popular messaging application WhatsApp has been in news over many reasons but only recently has attracted global attention after Israeli spyware Pegasus hacked as many as 1400 Whatsapp accounts.
The Facebook-owned company is making attempts to keep its users safe in these modern times when phishing or malware attacks have become quite common in this technology-enabled lifestyle, DC reports.
But according to new developments, WhatsApp group with ‘malicious’ names will be permanently banned.
Yes you heard it right. A recent Reddit thread claims the famous messaging app has banned their WhatsApp group just because of the name/
As per a report by WAPBetaInfo, the website states that they have been receiving a lot of reports from users that have been banned.
The report states, “The first report was found on Reddit, where the user Mowe11 published a post about his WhatsApp ban. He explained that a guy that was a participant of his group changed his university’s name group to something illegal, determining the ban for the entire group. He has also confirmed that all members got banned and that it was the 3rd time that a user did that. Another user from Reddit, FranciscoAlfaro, was in a group of his school, has about 100 participants. When he woke up, all members were mysteriously banned with no apparent reason.”
Another post from a user known as PiTiXX stated that he was banned from WhatsApp after his friend changed the group subject using the same malicious name and since then all the WhatsApp accounts remain suspended.
When these users tried to contact WhatsApp, they were met with an automated reply that explained that the ban took effect as they had violated the Terms of Service and that no further replies would be provided.
So is there something to worry about? Yes, for the fact that a user is helpless if he is wrongly banned by WhatsApp, as he can no longer do anything until his account is back.
The user will not even receive any assistance from Whatsapp regarding their banned accounts.
What’s next is, users whose WhatsApp account has been banned are forced to change their phone numbers and lose all their chat history in the process.
It is unclear, why this permanent ban takes place, but any group name with malicious name is being detected as malware.
Simply put, WhatsApp can detect malicious groups though it cannot see the contents of the groups.
WhatsApp could probably be seeing this as metadata wherein group date creation, group subject, group description etc are visible.