It is intended for users who may be of interest to attackers because of their activities, anti-maware.ru reports. This is primarily journalists, public figures, activists, and so on.
After enabling Strict Account Settings, WhatsApp automatically switches a number of parameters to the most stringent positions. The app starts blocking attachments and media files from unknown senders, silences calls from people outside of your contact list, and restricts other features that could potentially be used for an attack.
Meta emphasizes that all of this is enabled literally “with a few clicks.” You can find the new option by going to Settings → Privacy → Advanced. It will be rolled out gradually over the next few weeks.
In parallel, Meta also told about less noticeable, but equally important changes “under the hood”. The company is moving media processing in WhatsApp to code written in Rust, a programming language that is considered much safer in terms of memory handling. The new cross-platform media sharing library is named wamedia. It is responsible for processing photos, videos and other attachments and should make life much harder for spy tools that often exploit memory management bugs.
