From the year 2018 there has been a WhatsApp message doing rounds on an occasional note that those who send “Good Morning” and “Good Evening” photos, and GIFs downloaded from internet might become a victim of a cyber fraud perpetuated by Chinese hackers.
An international news resource from Shanghai confirmed the report and posted it as true on its TV channel in July 2020. Now, from the first week of January 2021, the same resource is busy re-publishing the same content that is as follows-
“Reports show that hackers in China designed some good morning and good evening images and videos in such a way that the embedded phishing code in them will hack and steal all the information stored on the device of the sender & the receiver, such as bank card information and other data. And it has been reported that over 500,000 victims have fallen prey to this fraud already”.
In reality, there is no truth in the content being mentioned in the message, as there are no reports of such phishing attempts from any part of the world till date. Moreover, the content being circulated is filled with multiple grammatical errors that not only make the content difficult to understand but also portrays the education level of the hacker/s as naïve.
Cybersecurity Insiders has done a fact check and tagged the above mentioned circulated WhatsApp content as pure fiction and a mischief of some cyber crooks. It is only confusing most readers who are new to WhatsApp and has learnt that it’s being circulated in regions such as South Africa, Canada, Singapore, Srilanka, in some parts of Europe and Nepal.
Note- A Phishing cyber attack is the fraudulent means of using electronic communication to deceive an internet user through manipulation by asking them to click on a malevolent attachment or a link embedded in a message; and eventually making the victim divulge confidential information.
