It seems like Google Messages users are getting gibberish text messages. Some users are receiving messages with a string of characters as the content of those messages. They seem to be arriving in an encrypted form.
Google Messages users seem to be getting gibberish text messages from unknown contacts
Those messages basically look like gibberish, as you’re getting tons of letters and numbers in no specific order. Chances are that they’re arriving this way because they couldn’t be encrypted. You can see a sample below.
As many of you know, Google Messages uses Rich Communication Services (RCS). That’s essentially a more secure way of texting when compared to SMS. It also offers advanced features, such as media sending, delivery and read receipts, and more.
RCS also offers end-to-end encryption to increase privacy. Only the person sending the message and the one receiving it can access it this way, not even Google can see the contents.
This looks like a bug, as the messages look like they failed to decrypt
Well, something went wrong, as users are getting these spam-like messages, as they probably couldn’t been unencrypted or something. Random messages, from random sources.
These reports occurred in a two-year-old Reddit thread. The thing is, the reports we’re referring to are all new. There have been a bunch of new comments in the past week or so, suggesting that the issue is rather serious.
Now, there’s a bit difference between the original issue reported in that thread and the new ones. The original post was from a user who received a message from one of its contacts. That message failed to be decrypted. After the contact sent it again, the decryption worked as intended.
These messages are coming from various different countries
This time around, the messages are coming from unknown senders, and it’s not a one-off situation, not at all. Those messages are coming from various different countries, including Indonesia, the Philippines, Cameroon, Tanzania, and more.
Is there anything these messages have in common? Yes, a link to Google’s support page, a real one. It’s actually a link that shows people what to do if a message fails to decrypt. So this seems to be a bug of some sort, though we can’t know for sure.
At the time of writing this article, Google did not offer up an explanation.
