Facebook Messenger bug proved that security is more important than features

The recent security vulnerability with Facebook Messenger was patched by Facebook promptly after a team of security researchers from Check Point exposed that security issue. Even though the vulnerability was classified as low and not a major one, it still brought back the world’s attention in how security issues still play a major role in technology and should be taken care of more urgently than the feature push that the mobile messaging services are pushing these days. One of the major reasons about such scrutiny to the topic is the sheer number of user base that Facebook Messenger commands. The number of users and the amount of data being transferred among the users is staggering as well as terrifying in the event of a security breach. WhatsApp leads the pack with almost 900 million monthly active users, while Facebook Messenger is a close second with almost 800 million monthly active users followed by WeChat, Viber and Line. Companies such as Facebook, Google and Microsoft should take a ground-up review of every aspect of the security, protocols and engineering instead of focusing on additional features like bots, interactivity and emojis. Security breach in one single app can bring down the entire curated, walled garden or secured apps, down. This loose end can potentially destroy the best of security features implemented by peer apps in the device. The case of Facebook Messenger with a security breach, where a hacker can take control of the conversation and change parts of conversations including removing messages, files, photos or links and replacing them with whatever content he or she wants, was serious because something like this could have been exploited by hackers in pushing across malicious content or files. The development came immediately after reports of Facebook adding end-to-end encryption. The scenarios of things going bad are endless since now mobile messaging apps are shifting to become gateways of financial transaction with hundreds of millions of monthly active users.