WhatsApp is the most used messaging platform to communicate with our friends and families. We can easily send messages, photos, and files. Being the most used messaging platform, spy agencies are creating a replica of WhatsApp with the same functionalities and spying on their country’s people. One incident happened recently in Italy, as reported by TechCrunch.
The news covers how Meta has warned several users in Italy that they were using a fake version of WhatsApp, used by a software company based in Italy named SIO, with its subsidiary company ASIGINT. More than 200 people were affected by accidentally downloading the mimicry application from various third-party websites and various phishing links, and it tricked users into installing it manually.
Once the app was installed, they were able to steal text messages, call logs, and everything — and the surprising fact is that the targeted users are mostly Apple users. After the incident came to light, WhatsApp put out a warning message to the users: “Download the official WhatsApp to Continue.” WhatsApp also claims there is no vulnerability in their application and strongly stated it was end-to-end encrypted.
To go further, WhatsApp was planning to send a legal complaint to the spyware company to stop this malicious activity.
So, people — don’t download any application from outside of the Play Store or App Store, unless you are very sure. Some open-source applications have to be downloaded from third-party app platforms, and mostly they are safe, but don’t download them from third-party and unidentified websites.
