SAN FRANCISCO – Are you using WhatsApp on your computer? Now you can find out if your account has been hacked or tampered with.
The Meta group has teamed up with a security service to create an extension that can verify the authenticity of the connection to your WhatsApp account by checking the code being served to your browser. Here’s how it works.
Since rolling out the WhatsApp messaging platform to browsers, Meta has observed an increase in its use via the web application.
This change in usage has led the American giant to think differently about user security. With this in mind, Meta has teamed up with security specialists Cloudflare to launch Code Verify.
This new project, which takes the form of a web extension, allows users to check the integrity of their WhatsApp account on the Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge browsers.
No other end-to-end encrypted messaging service has this level of security for people’s communications on the web. In addition to deploying Code Verify for WhatsApp Web, it is also being offered as open source so that other services can use it as well,” explains Meta in a news release.
To use the extension, users simply have to pin it to their browser’s toolbar.
Then, the Code Verify extension analyses the code that runs when launching the WhatsApp web application, in order to determine whether your account has been compromised: “If there are any inconsistencies, Code Verify will notify the user,” explains the American group. The user has no further action to perform in order to launch the analysis process.
