All those who recently downloaded the WhatsApp application on their mobile phone are hereby alerted about Zombie app which mimics the real application but is actually a notorious adware.
According to a report of Digital Trends, the fake app has been downloaded 4 million times from Google Play Store.
Google has taken down the counterfeit now and is said to have launched a probe on the issue.
Security experts from Avast say that the developers of the messenger app used a clever trick to make it look authentic by adding an invisible Unicode character space to the end of the name. This made the computer code read it as “WhatsApp+Inc%C2%Ao”. They suspect that the said malware could have been developed by hackers from East Java, Indonesia.
Many users started to post comments on Reddit about their experience with the fake WhatsApp application. Some said that the logo of the fake app made them download the application, while some have fallen prey to the 4.2-star user rating. And whoever has downloaded the app is now being bombarded with ads. Whereas the original app owned by Facebook doesn’t do so in reality.
Note 1-In 2015, Google took steps to block a fake battery monitoring app which was sending premium text messages from victim’s phones.
Note 2-Google is soon going to roll out a new smarter technology to find bad apps earlier. But till then it still has to bank on the community of users and developers to flag fake and notorious apps.
