This clone app of WhatsApp is spying on Indians! Have you installed somewhere?

India is among the countries with the most Android Trojan detections and a cloned, third-party unofficial version of WhatsApp is the leader in spying on people’s chats in the country. This has been warned in a new report. According to a report by cyber-security firm ESET, GB WhatsApp (a popular but cloned third party version of WhatsApp) was behind a large portion of Android spyware detection in the last four months. Such malicious apps have a wide range of spying capabilities, including recording audio and video.

Full of malware

“The cloned app is not available on Google Play and hence, there is no security check as compared to the legitimate WhatsApp and the versions available on various download websites are full of malware,” the report said. India (35 per cent) was second only to China (53 per cent) in terms of geolocation for bots that made up the largest Internet of Things (IoT) botnet named ‘Moji’ from May to August 2022. However, China and India have the largest number of IoT bots geolocated inside their respective countries.

‘Moji’ botnet on autopilot

“These data confirm the notion that the ‘Moji’ botnet is on autopilot, operating without human supervision since its iconic author was arrested in 2021,” the report said. Despite dwindling numbers, Russian IP addresses remained responsible for the largest portion of Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) attacks. “Russia was also the country most targeted by ransomware, with some of the attacks being politically or ideologically motivated by war,” said Roman Kovac, ESET’s chief research officer.

Can steal credit card information

The report also examined threats affecting home users. “In the context of threats directly affecting virtual and physical currencies, a web skimmer known as Magkart continues to pose a major threat to online shoppers following credit card details,” Kovac said.