New Delhi: A fresh analysis has cautioned that a cloned, third-party, unapproved version of WhatsApp is leading in the country in terms of spying on people’s chats and that India is one of the nations with the highest number of Android malware detections.
According to a survey by the cyber-security company ESET, ‘GB WhatsApp’, a well-known but cloned third-party version of WhatsApp, was responsible for a significant fraction of Android spyware detection in the previous four months.
These malicious programmes can record audio and video in addition to having many other surveillance features.
“The cloned app is not available on Google Play and, therefore, there are no security checks in place compared with the legitimate WhatsApp, and versions available on various download websites are riddled with malware,” said the report.
From May to August 2022, India (35%) came in second place after China (53%) as the geolocation for the largest internet of things (IoT) botnet known as “Mozi.”
Between May and August, the number of bots in the IoT botnet “Mozi” decreased from 500,000 compromised devices to 383,000, a decrease of 23 per cent.
Nevertheless, China and India remained to have the most IoT bots that were geolocated inside of their respective nations.
“These statistics confirm the assumption that the ‘Mozi’ botnet is on autopilot, running without human supervision since its reputed author was arrested in 2021,” said the report.
Russian IP addresses remained to account for the majority of remote desktop protocol (RDP) attacks despite their numbers dropping.
“Russia was also the country that was most targeted by ransomware, with some of the attacks being politically or ideologically motivated by the war,” said Roman Kovac, Chief Research Officer at ESET.
Threats mostly affecting residential users were also covered in the report.
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