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India is among the countries with the highest number of Android Trojan detections, and a cloned unofficial third-party version of WhatsApp is leading the way in spying on people’s chats in the country, a new report has warned.
Behind much of the Android spyware detection in the past four months was “GB WhatsApp” — a popular but cloned third-party version of WhatsApp, according to a report by cybersecurity firm ESET.
Such malicious apps have a wide range of spying capabilities, including audio and video recording.
“The cloned app is not available on Google Play and therefore has no security checks in place compared to the legitimate WhatsApp, and the versions available on various download sites are riddled with malware,” the report said.
India (35 percent) also ranked second after China (53 percent) as the geolocation for bots making up the largest Internet of Things (IoT) botnet called “Mozi” from May to August 2022.
IoT botnet “Mozi” saw bots drop by 23 per cdnt from 500,000 compromised devices to 383,000 in May-August.
However, China and India continued to have the highest number of IoT bots located in their respective countries.
“These statistics support the assumption that the ‘Mozi’ botnet has been on autopilot and has been running without human oversight since its alleged author was arrested in 2021,” the report said.
Despite the declining numbers, Russian IP addresses were still responsible for the largest share of Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) attacks.
“Russia was also the country most targeted by ransomware, with some attacks being politically or ideologically motivated by war,” said Roman Kováč, ESET’s Chief Research Officer.
The report also examined threats that mostly impact home users.
“When it comes to threats directly affecting virtual and physical currencies, the web skimmer known as Magecart remains the main threat that tracks online shoppers’ credit card information,” Kovac said.
