Last week we picked up on a discovery made by a team of reachers from the University of New Haven’s Cyber Forensics Research & Education Group. They found that Viber wasn’t encrypting images or videos being sent through its apps. Any attacker with the technical know-how would have been able to intercept the data, which obviously isn’t the possibility that users would be too happy about. Fortunately Viber has now stepped up its encryption game.
An update for the Viber Android application has already been released, it includes “enhancements to the way Viber handles photo, video and location messages.” Basically what this means is that all of this data will now be encrypted. Previously only text messages were encrypted while phone numbers and contact information were not.
So far an update for the Viber iOS app has not been released though the company has confirmed that the fix has been submitted to Apple. This means that it won’t be long before an updated app for iOS is also available, thus increasing data security for Viber users on Apple’s mobile platform.
The company did say last week that it wasn’t aware of a “single user who has been affected by this.” Even if that’s true its always best to be safe than sorry. If you use Viber on Android, it goes without saying that you should update the app right away.