AI agent traffic across DataDome’s network grew 41.5% quarter over quarter to nearly 25 billion requests in Q3 2026, according to the company’s AI Traffic Report Q3 2026. Meta’s Muse generated 29.1 million requests between September 22 and October 3, its first 12 days of full availability. In a sample of Muse traffic, 99.3% of requests came from cloud and CDN infrastructure.

Nearly half of the AI agent traffic recorded in 2026 through September occurred in Q3. The growth had left capacity plans and bot-management policies based on the previous quarter’s averages out of date.

Meta leads AI agent traffic

Meta-ExternalAgent and Meta-WebIndexer generated a combined 12.4 billion requests in Q3, accounting for 49.7% of AI agent traffic recorded. Meta-WebIndexer overtook Meta-ExternalAgent in September, which is interpreted as a sign of continued investment in AI answer generation. ClaudeBot ranked fourth for the quarter, overtaking GPTBot.

Top AI agents per month (Source: DataDome)

OpenAI, Anthropic and Amazon each use separate bots to collect training data, index pages for AI search and retrieve pages when users ask questions. Each bot has a distinct name, allowing website owners to allow or block it individually. These controls do not cover AI agents that browse websites through a regular browser without using those bot names.

This separation gives publishers a way to refuse model training while remaining accessible to AI search and answer services. It also helps AI companies develop search results with current information and source links, reducing their reliance on Bing, Google or Brave.

Each additional bot gives publishers another access setting to manage. Companies do not always explain upfront how each bot treats robots.txt, the file website owners use to communicate rules for automated access.

Agentic browser traffic nearly quintuples

Agentic browser traffic in the dataset rose from 12.5 million requests in August to 58.2 million in September. Excluding Muse, traffic more than tripled to 38.7 million requests.

ChatGPT’s cloud browser generated the most traffic in the category in September. Muse accounted for 33% of that month’s total after becoming fully available on September 22. Comet’s traffic fell 65% from July to September.

Muse is a personal AI agent that operates inside a dedicated cloud virtual machine containing a browser. DataDome includes it in the agentic browser category because its traffic is browser-driven.

Its daily traffic patterns were consistent with user activity instead of a scheduled crawl. In the sample, 8.9% of requests reached sensitive website endpoints, including login, payment, account creation, shopping cart and form pages. Forms accounted for 81% of that sensitive traffic, receiving about eight times as many requests as login pages.

“Muse is the first mass-market example of where agentic traffic is heading. It works from its own cloud virtual machine, so nearly all of its requests look like data-center traffic rather than a user’s device, and a meaningful share lands on forms and checkout flows,” said Jerome Segura, VP of Threat Research at DataDome.

“Policies that trust residential or ISP-based traffic won’t catch agents like this. Organizations need to validate agent identity, understand intent, and decide deliberately which agents to allow and what they’re authorized to do.”

from Help Net Security https://ift.tt/wI5fevU

Ransomware attackers threatened employees’ family members or friends at 37% of organizations surveyed for Semperis’ 2026 Ransomware Risk Report. The survey covered 1,200 IT and security professionals at organizations that had experienced at least one successful ransomware attack.

“Ransomware has proven to be a great cash-generating activity for criminal syndicates, which have no hesitation about inflicting both cyber and physical harm,” said Mickey Bresman, Semperis CEO.

Threats reach beyond the workplace

Respondents described threatening messages, stalking and threats of physical harm. Criminals use these tactics to increase pressure on employees and their employers to meet ransom demands.

A quarter said employees or their family members needed medical or psychological treatment because of ransomware threats. Meanwhile, 23% reported swatting, where someone makes a false emergency report to send police to a person’s location.

Doxxing, which involves exposing someone’s personal information online without consent, was another consequence described by respondents. Some employees needed security protection or changed jobs, offices or homes following an attack.

What threats did attackers leverage? (Source: Semperis)

Documenting response roles across the organization and including procedures for threats against people outside the workplace, such as employees’ family members is recommended. Establishing relationships with law enforcement before an incident is also advised.

The personal consequences add to the pressure on staff responding to an attack.

“IT and cybersecurity staff are already dealing with high levels of stress,” says Tim Beasley, Semperis Senior Incident Response Consultant. “A ransomware attack takes that to a whole new level. I’ve seen CISOs literally say, ‘I’m out, I’m done, I can’t do this. It isn’t worth it.’ I’ve seen people walk out the door because leadership thought they mismanaged something that caused the breach to occur. It all takes a mental toll.”

Restoring operations can leave attackers with access

Some 69% of surveyed organizations experienced multiple successful ransomware attacks within the previous year.

Recovering from an incident requires teams to find how criminals entered, remove their access and check the systems being restored. Malware, backdoors and compromised accounts can give intruders a way back into the organization.

Pressure to resume operations can lead businesses to restore services before establishing whether attackers have been removed. That leaves unresolved weaknesses available for another intrusion.

Ransom payments remained common, with 59% of respondents saying their organization paid. Reasons included protecting customer information, limiting disruption and containing reputational damage. Some paid because they could not remove attackers from their environment.

Payment provides no guarantee of recovering data or system access. Receiving a decryption key also does not eliminate the need to rebuild the environment to a trusted state. Decryption tools can be buggy or contain malicious code, and some files may remain unrecoverable.

Restoring access needs its own plan

Attackers targeted or exploited identity systems in 87% of surveyed cases. Services such as Active Directory, Entra ID and Okta manage accounts, sign-ins and permissions across an organization.

Control of these systems can help criminals access connected services, change user privileges and interfere with recovery. Responders need to establish which accounts remain safe and whether permissions have been altered.

Half of the surveyed organizations had dedicated identity backups. A trusted copy of account and permission information helps teams restore access without carrying compromised settings into the rebuilt environment.

Identity recovery also affects the order in which services can return. Employees need working accounts to use restored applications, and administrators need trusted access to manage them.

Respondents identified evolving cyber threats, outdated systems, technical debt and regulatory demands as leading challenges to keeping operations running and recovering from attacks. They also cited outdated crisis plans, undefined roles and responsibilities, and communication gaps between teams as barriers during incident response.

from Help Net Security https://ift.tt/8y61JPr

Here’s an overview of some of last week’s most interesting news, articles, interviews and videos:

Strands Box: Open-source sandbox for AI agents
AWS released Strands Box, an open source sandbox for AI agents that pairs operating-system isolation with rules that can weigh what an agent has already done before letting it act again. Box is in developer preview and runs on Macs with Apple silicon, with Linux support planned.

Geopolitics and the cyber resilience gap belong in your threat model
In this Help Net Security interview, Akshay Joshi, Head of the Centre for Cybersecurity at the World Economic Forum, talks about how AI, geopolitics and industrialized fraud are changing cyber risk. He discusses findings from the Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026, including that CEOs now rank cyber-enabled fraud above ransomware as their top concern.

npm Trusted Publishing flaw exposed 1,500+ npm packages to takeover
Bloom Security researchers found that npm’s Trusted Publishing feature let an attacker push new versions of someone else’s package without stealing a credential. The attacker only needed to register a GitHub repository name the maintainer had left behind. Bloom counted more than 1,500 npm packages exposed this way, and GitHub, which owns npm, says it has shipped fixes.

Patching and preventing issues: What are the lessons you can learn?
In this Help Net Security interview, Kunal Modasiya, Senior VP & GM at Qualys, talks about why patching is still hard to get right. He explains how business pressure, revenue-critical systems, and patches that break things keep fixes from going out. Modasiya argues that speed alone has limits and that teams should look at the whole remediation workflow.

Immuta CISO predicts critical AI incidents at major enterprises within 18 months
In this Help Net Security interview, Michael Scott, CISO at Immuta, talks about how organizations should handle permissions for AI agents. He argues agents should be treated as lower-trust identities that don’t inherit everything their user can access.

Why Active Directory weaknesses stay open for years in teams with one or two admins
David Fuhr, CTO at intcube, talks about a security cohort for public administration, where 27 municipalities hardened Windows Server and Active Directory together over 12 weeks. This Help Net Security interview covers how a cohort works, with weekly sessions, homework and measurements at the start and end.

The cyber talent shortage? Job postings just hit a four-year low
US employers posted 235,786 cybersecurity jobs from January through September 2026. That is the lowest total for those months in the four years that staffing and workforce intelligence firm CyberSN has tracked. They pulled the listings from job data provider JobSpikr, removed duplicates and sorted each one by the security work it described.

Hidden implant in Ledger hardware wallets linked to $93M theft
Three days after customers in Southeast Asia began reporting drained wallets, Ledger says the damage is limited. In its 72-hour update on X on October 11, the Paris-based hardware wallet maker said “all confirmed cases related to the disclosed draining incident of Oct 9th, 2026, involve devices sold through the Southeast Asia reseller CryptoBilis.”

Cyberattacks hit European grocers: French supermarket freezers hijacked, Dutch and Belgian stores disrupted
European food retailers have been affected by two separate disruptive cyberattacks: In France, several supermarket chains have had their fridges and freezers tampered with and chilled/frozen products destroyed, while in the Netherlands and Belgium workers at stores owned by Dutch multinational Ahold Delhaize have been dealing with disruption resulting from an unspecified “security issue”.

Microsoft fixes exploited Mark of the Web bypass vulnerability (CVE-2026-96951)
In another record-breaking Patch Tuesday, Microsoft has squashed over 1,400 security bugs, including a Mark of the Web bypass vulnerability (CVE-2026-96951) exploited by attackers in the wild. CVE-2026-96951 is a command injection vulnerability in Windows Shell that can be triggered by remote attackers via a file that is designed to exploit the vulnerability.

Attackers chained three Ivanti zero-days to gain root on fully patched VPN appliances
A threat actor has been using an exploit chain combining three vulnerabilities in Ivanti’s Connect Secure (ICS) appliances to breach organizations, collect credentials, exfiltrate configuration data, and perform network reconnaissance.

Be a good AI ancestor: Cybersecurity already gave us the playbook
AI has brought us to a familiar inflection point in the story of privacy, cybersecurity, and online safety. We have an opportunity to apply decades of cybersecurity experience before the next generation of technology creates consequences we cannot easily reverse. Lisa Thee, Commissioner at Global Council for Responsible AI learned the importance of that responsibility through a three-year-old child called Adia. Her name is a protective pseudonym.

Let’s Encrypt TLS certificate lifetimes to drop from 90 to 64 days starting February 2027
Websites that rely on Let’s Encrypt will soon have to renew their TLS certificates more often. Starting February 10, 2027, the certificate authority will issue certificates valid for 64 days by default, down from 90 days.

Low-cost Android phones are arriving with malware that owners can’t uninstall
People who buy low-cost Android phones from online marketplaces may be carrying malware that was placed on the device before it reached them, Bitdefender has found.

Most high-severity cloud security findings are downgraded once an AI agent checks the environment
Cloud security platforms turn every failed rule into a finding, and those findings pile up in queues sorted by severity. Research from Sola Security tested what happens to that order when each finding gets checked against the environment where it lives.

GitLab admins urged to patch critical RCE flaw (CVE-2026-97229)
GitLab is urging users of self-managed instances to patch a critical vulnerability (CVE-2026-97229) in its CI/CD Regular Expression Compiler that could allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code on GitLab servers. CVE-2026-97229 is an integer overflow vulnerability in GitLab’s CI/CD Regular Expression Compiler, and it affects both GitLab Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE).

Ukrainian drones hit Yandex data centers, sparking claims that Russian troll farms went quiet
Russian tech giant Yandex confirmed that drones hit three of its data centers, shutting down the facilities in Sasovo and Vladimir and knocking out part of the infrastructure in Kaluga. On October 11, Yandex Cloud told its customers that the platform was running in emergency mode and advised them to switch to their own disaster recovery plans, after a drone attack shut down the company’s data center in Vladimir. The facility was the third Yandex data center hit within four days.

OpenAI engineer arrested for allegedly trying to eavesdrop on executive meetings
A recording device wrapped in toilet paper and plugged into the back of a television in an executive conference room at OpenAI’s San Francisco office has led to the arrest of one of the company’s engineers.

Phase Eight, Hobbs and Whistles owner joins growing list of fashion retailers targeted by hackers
People who have shopped with Phase Eight, Hobbs or Whistles will have to wait to find out whether their personal information was exposed in a cyberattack on the company behind the three UK fashion brands.

FBI raids 40+ laptop farms helping North Korea pocket US tech salaries
North Korean IT workers used stolen and fabricated identities to land remote jobs at more than 70 US companies, with help from Americans who allegedly kept company-issued laptops running from their homes, according to the US Department of Justice.

CISA flags exploited flaws in Palo Alto, Cisco and Ahsay products
The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added four new vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. The agency added them based on evidence of active exploitation and has given US federal civilian agencies three days, until October 17, 2026, to address the vulnerabilities.

KGB RAT trojan packs webcam spying, password theft and a “fun” menu to terrorize victims
A Windows trojan advertised on hacking forums for as little as $150 a month promises buyers access to a victim’s webcam, microphone, keystrokes and saved passwords, and comes with a set of features made to frighten the person on the other side of the screen.

Fake Arch Linux AUR packages exploit typos to run malware with root privileges
Arch Linux users who mistyped yay or paru while installing the package helpers from the Arch User Repository (AUR) may have given a stranger root access to their machine. AUR is a popular community package source for Arch Linux and related distributions, hosting user-submitted build scripts for proprietary programs, beta builds and older software versions that the official repositories do not carry.

Scammers clone candidates’ voices to steal cash and voter data ahead of 2026 midterms, FBI warns
Three weeks before Americans vote in the 2026 midterm election, fraudsters are borrowing candidate names, logos and slogans to collect fake donations and harvest personal data, the FBI warned.

Hackers disguise phishing as promising business opportunities
Attackers are breaking into business email accounts with short messages asking whether a company can quote on an upcoming project, the kind of request sales and procurement staff answer every week. Cadence Riddle, a cybersecurity researcher at Fortra, tracked a 12-fold increase in malicious emails mentioning “RFQ” (request for quotation) between October 2025 and September 2026. In nearly 73% of cases, the lure led to a page built to steal login credentials.

What makes some open source updates so difficult?
Many organizations adopt open source software because they see it as a cheaper alternative to proprietary development. Maintaining it, however, still requires engineering effort, according to Google’s case study, “How much does it cost to maintain a copy of an open source software package (at Google)?”

AI vulnerability patching has a grading problem
Researchers at Northwestern University tested AI coding agents on 112 real security bugs. They found that a patch which stops a crash often fails the checks the project’s maintainers wrote for the fix. With Claude Opus 4.7, third of the patches that made the crash go away still failed those maintainer tests.

Windows PCs missing key updates could lose security fixes in 2027
Microsoft is advising users and businesses to update Windows devices before digital certificates used to verify Windows Update servers expire in May and June 2027. The certificates expire on May 17 or June 19, depending on the Windows version. Devices without replacement certificates will lose access to Windows Update, including security fixes delivered through the service. Microsoft is distributing the replacements through a process known as certificate rotation.

Microsoft’s new model helps AI agents judge their next move
Microsoft-Decision-1 is a small decision-scoring model. Given a situation, a question and a fixed set of answer options, it returns a calibrated probability for each option.

Frontier AI cleared every OT attack goal Booz Allen set in its lab
Booz Allen set frontier AI models against an isolated industrial-control testbed in its Chantilly, Virginia lab and watched them clear all eight attack objectives it had defined. The models mapped the network, tied equipment to known weaknesses, wrote working exploits, pivoted into the systems that run production, and in the last test found a robotic arm, took administrative control, and moved it.

Meta outlines Muse Wonder safeguards for AI agents acting on your behalf
Meta’s Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full models are built for AI agents that handle tasks such as preparing insurance claims, reviewing leases and developing software. The models combine document analysis and tool use with the ability to retain relevant details across conversations and work through obstacles toward a user’s goal.

Mozilla’s Firefox Enterprise lets companies block shadow AI in the browser
Mozilla’s Firefox Enterprise is a paid platform that lets organizations control how sensitive data is shared, check device security, and manage employee access to web applications. The platform pairs the browser with a management dashboard hosted on an organization’s own infrastructure.

Google quadruples Chrome bug bounty base pay, offers up to $20,000 for sandbox escapes
Google is updating its Chrome Vulnerability Rewards Program (Chrome VRP), increasing payments for memory corruption vulnerabilities and expanding rewards for other security flaws, fixes and research tools.

Most companies count AI agents as insiders, and CISOs worry about their own liability
Software that works on an employee’s behalf is now turning up in incident reports. At 95% of the companies in a Trellix survey of 600 CISOs, an AI agent or other autonomous system was linked to an insider incident in the past 12 months.

Meshery: Open-source cloud-native manager for Kubernetes
Meshery is an open-source tool for designing, deploying and managing Kubernetes infrastructure, built by Layer5 and its community and hosted as a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project. Teams use it to lay out clusters and applications on a visual canvas, check the design, and push it to multiple clusters and clouds from one central console, without hand-editing YAML.

GitHub adopts cheaper AI model to catch secrets developers leave in code
GitHub has trained a credential classifier to improve generic secret detection and reduce false alerts. The new pipeline cut median post-push scan execution time by 86% and model serving costs by more than 98% compared with its previous large language model (LLM) pipeline.

Product showcase: GuardOS checks QR links, scans for data breaches, and filters Safari content
GuardOS is an iPhone application that combines device security checks, VPN access, Safari content filtering, QR link scanning, and storage cleanup. It is available through the App Store.

AI-generated changes create review bottlenecks in software delivery
83.4% of respondents who use DevOps practices run CI/CD pipelines, making them the most widely adopted practice in that group, according to JetBrains’ The State of CI/CD in 2026 report. Adoption exceeds that of containerisation and orchestration, infrastructure as code, GitOps and platform engineering.

The internet’s attack surface moves at very different speeds
Censys found that AI-related software exposed to the public internet grew 63% in nine months, from 164,088 IP addresses in October 2025 to 267,915 in July 2026. Elsewhere in its scans, the internet-scanning company measured much slower movement. Exposed industrial control systems rose about 4% in two and a half years. The oldest versions of four widely deployed business products barely changed their share at all.

Microsoft disrupts phishing network behind more than a billion scam messages
Microsoft uncovered a criminal marketplace supplying tools and accounts used in phishing scams worldwide. Attackers used these resources to target organizations in healthcare, financial services, wholesale distribution, and IT across Japan, the United States, Australia, and India.

Fake CAPTCHAs are tricking users into running malware on their own devices
Fake CAPTCHA checks are being used to do more than hide phishing pages. Attackers are turning the familiar “prove you’re human” step into a gateway for malware downloads, malicious browser notifications, and commands that victims are tricked into running themselves, according to Barracuda.

Fastfetch 2.70.0 changes how Disk free space is reported
Fastfetch is a system information tool written mainly in C that runs on Linux, macOS, Windows 8.1 and later, Android and several BSDs. The fastfetch project removed QuickJS scripting and changed what its Disk, Command and Shell modules report in version 2.70.0, released October 14. Configs written for older versions may print different values or stop working.

DDoS attacks can knock services offline before links reach capacity
More than 9.1 million DDoS attacks were recorded globally between January and June 2026, an increase of nearly a quarter year over year, according to Netscout’s DDoS Threat Intelligence Report.

Stolen AI API keys are paying for hackers’ autonomous scans
A seller on a restricted criminal forum is marketing an autonomous hacking tool that runs on stolen OpenAI, Anthropic and Google API keys, so the key’s owner pays for the scans. Bitsight’s threat intelligence team tracked the shift across thousands of posts on 16 underground forums from February through August 2026. Over that window, mentions of AI agents, indirect prompt injection and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) rose 67 percent.

Android adds AI-powered scam alerts, hangs up on bank impostors
Google’s new scam protections cover Google Messages and third-party messaging apps, with an enhanced protection mode, expanded scam alerts and safeguards against call-forwarding and screen-sharing scams.

Download: The IT and security field guide to AI adoption
Security and IT teams are under pressure to adopt AI, but many are seeing the opposite of what was promised. This guide breaks down why AI adoption fails in practice and gives teams a clearer path forward, from evaluation to implementation, with humans in the loop.

Cybersecurity jobs available right now: October 13, 2026
We’ve scoured the market to bring you a selection of roles that span various skill levels within the cybersecurity field. Check out this weekly selection of cybersecurity jobs available right now.

New infosec products of the week: October 16, 2026
Here’s a look at the most interesting products from the past week, featuring releases from NinjaOne, Qualys, Scytale, and SolarWinds.

from Help Net Security https://ift.tt/X3mtW9F

New research shows that squid lived all around the globe even before the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction event.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Blog moderation policy.

from Schneier on Security https://ift.tt/jlEnRxu

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication.

Powered by the M6 chip, the compact 2026 Mac mini is currently 13% off at Amazon, dropping its price to $779.99 from $899. That gives shoppers in the Apple ecosystem a small but mighty computer, meant for home offices and creative workspaces short on desk space.

Apple 2026 Mac Mini

$779.99 at Amazon

$899.00 Save $119.01

$779.99 at Amazon

$899.00 Save $119.01

The entry-level model pairs a 12-core CPU and 12-core GPU with 16GB of unified memory and a modest 256GB SSD, but its speed and five-by-five-inch footprint help make up for the limited storage. If you want to upgrade to the 512GB model, you can still get a 14% discount, although it costs $170 more. The Mac mini supports up to three monitors and can handle everyday work and multitasking.

It comes in a sleek aluminum enclosure with rounded corners, and the metal case sits atop a rubberized plastic base lined with cooling vents. It has front-facing USB-C ports and a headphone jack, as well as plenty of connectivity options, including Thunderbolt 4, HDMI, 2.5Gb Ethernet, wifi 7, and Bluetooth 6. For those with iPhones, iPads, and other Apple devices, it also offers seamless integration. PCMag, which gave it an Editors’ Choice award, praises its ability to stay cool and quiet under load, along with its impressive CPU and GPU performance.

Our Best Editor-Vetted Tech Deals Right Now

Apple AirPods Pro 3 Noise Cancelling Heart Rate Wireless Earbuds — $199.00 (List Price $249.00)

Apple HomeView Smart Display (Silver, 2026 Release) — $289.99 (List Price $289.99)

Apple TV 4K 4th Gen 128GB Streaming Player (2026 Model) — $299.00 (List Price $299.00)

Ring Indoor Cam Plus 2K Wired Security Camera (2-Pack, White) — $99.99 (List Price $119.98)

TCL Tab 10 Gen 4 128GB 10.1" Tablet (Dark Blue/Gray) — $169.99 (List Price $199.99)

Apple Watch SE 3 — $219.00 (List Price $249.00)

Google Fitbit Edge Activity Tracker (Obsidian) — $179.99 (List Price $179.99)

Deals are selected by our commerce team

from Lifehacker https://ift.tt/yclBLoN

Matthew Green has a new site that tries to estimate the number of cryptanalyst-hours that have been spent analyzing different public-key algorithms:

Abstract: We estimate how much public cryptanalysis each public-key assumption has received, using the literature itself as the instrument. From roughly sixteen thousand candidate papers we classify cryptanalytic work on ECDLP, structured and plain lattices, syndrome decoding and their comparators, then convert papers into estimated research-allocation years through a person-level author map. These publication-based estimates may substantially overstate actual time spent. Lattices have overtaken elliptic curves in this cumulative measure only recently; we express that history as inference budgets under stated productivity assumptions. The study was conducted by AI models: Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Opus 5.5 built the pipeline, ran the analysis and wrote this page, with contributions from GPT-6 Astra. Matthew Green set the questions, made the key methodological decisions and oversaw the work.

There are a lot of caveats to this analysis. It relies on published work, so anything unpublished does not count. This includes both academic cryptanalysis that didn’t result in a paper, and intelligence agency cryptanalysis done in secret. But it’s a good first stab at a metric of this sort.

from Schneier on Security https://ift.tt/3Y0Un4X

The worst thing about your favorite chat app is trying to get your friends and family to use it. WhatsApp may be the most popular messaging platform in the world, but in the United States, it is hardly universally adopted. On the contrary, you'll find plenty of people who don't use it at all. In short, it's difficult to get a whole group to commit to any one platform, which can make casual video calls frustrating: If you don't use WhatsApp, and your friends are hosting a call, what are you supposed to do? You can't join a WhatsApp call without a WhatsApp account.

That's now changing. Meta, WhatsApp's parent company, announced "guest calling" on Wednesday. Now, any WhatsApp user can invite any non-WhatsApp user to a call, even if the recipient doesn't have an account. These calls still get the same core perks as traditional WhatsApp calls, Meta says: They're free and end-to-end encrypted, so you won't be compromising on your privacy by calling a non-WhatsApp user this way.

Non-WhatsApp users are still limited. Meta says these users always need a call host's approval to join. If you're a non-WhatsApp user, you'll find yourself in a waiting room until the call host lets you in. Meta also says that you can be kicked off the call at any time, and you won't be able to see other callers' phone numbers. You won't be able to send messages or add other users to the call. You are purely a participant.

How to invite someone without a WhatsApp account to a WhatsApp call

If you're trying to add a non-WhatsApp user to a call, first head to the Calls tab in the app. Here, hit (+), create a call link, then send it to the recipient. Meta says the user can open the link in their computer browser, enter their name, and join. This applies to one-on-one calls as well as calls with up to 32 people. While guests will have the aforementioned limits, they do have some features available to them. They can share their screen, react with emojis, or raise their hand.

WhatsApp isn't the first chat app to offer such a feature. Apple's FaceTime platform, for example, lets you create call links that anyone can join, whether they're calling in on an Apple device or a device running Android or Windows (or Linux, for that matter).

from Lifehacker https://ift.tt/X0hKkBc