WhatsApp Will Soon Start To Alert You When You Are About To Open Unsafe Links

Sharing links on WhatsApp has become one way of sharing information on the social media platform. And if you are accustomed to ‘receiving links’ you surely have noticed that when your contact sends you a link, you get a preview of the page’s contents.

Now WhatsApp will upgrade this feature to come up with a new feature called Suspicious Link Detection. The name itself tells it explicitly that the feature will help users to detect sent and received suspicious links to any web page which WhatsApp determines to be malicious.

How does it really work?

When a user receives such a link through WhatsApp, “WhatsApp analyzes the link in order to detect if it may redirect to a fake or alternative website. If it detects a suspicious link, a user will then receive a warning in red color (as shown below) suggesting that the link is “suspicious”.

And if you decide to ignore the first warning (warning in red color), WhatsApp will warn you again that “you are trying to open a possible suspicious link”, as shown below;

Although the report does not really go into explaining which links WhatsApp marks as malicious, by looking at the above screenshots, one can be excused to assume that web pages with HTTP in the URL will be one of the factors that would make WhatsApp label a link as unsafe. HTTP links are generally considered to be not secure, so I think it is in light of this that web pages with ‘HTTP’ will be the ones that will be detected as malicious.

The Suspicious Link Detection feature goes hand in hand with Chrome and Firefox browsers which inform a user they visiting an unsafe link. Judging by the links (and malware spread through fake links) that are continuously being shared on the internet, this feature seems to be very useful.

When will users get this feature?

The Suspicious Link Detection feature will be included in WhatsApp’s next update.