• Log In
  • Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Home
  • About
  • Structure
  • Gradebook

ITACS 5211: Introduction to Ethical Hacking

Wade Mackey

Fake WhatsApp On Google Play Store Downloaded By Over 1 Million Android Users

November 14, 2017 by Younes Khantouri Leave a Comment

This is another article that shows how much big companies that make so much money to take people security under consideration. Few days ago, cyber criminals took advantage of Google’s official Play Store leak to place a fake Whatsupp application which was downloaded from over 1 million android users.

Dubbed Update WhatsApp Messenger, came from an app developer who pretended to be the actual WhatsApp service with the developer title “WhatsApp Inc.”—the same title the actual WhatsApp messenger uses on Google Play. The biggest question will be, how this app developer was able to use the same title as the legitimate Facebook-owner maker of the messaging client? the answer is very simple: Thank you to the Unicode character space. in other words, the app maker added a Unicode character space after the actual WhatsApp Inc. name, which in computer code reads WhatsApp+Inc%C2%A0. This caracter in the end of WhatsApp Inc. was invisible enough to trick most of the downloaders including Google IT security people.

Google just removed the fake WhatsApp Android app from the official Play Store, but this incident make so many users of the Google Play Store think about the security efforts that Google put on to secure us.

https://thehackernews.com/2017/11/fake-whatsapp-android.html

Filed Under: Week 12: Web Services Tagged With:

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Primary Sidebar

Weekly Discussions

  • Uncategorized (33)
  • Week 01: Overview (2)
  • Week 02: TCP/IP and Network Architecture (2)
  • Week 03: Reconnaisance (11)
  • Week 04: Vulnerability Scanning (14)
  • Week 05: System and User Enumeration (13)
  • Week 06: Sniffers (17)
  • Week 07: NetCat and HellCat (17)
  • Week 08: Social Engineering, Encoding and Encryption (21)
  • Week 09: Malware (14)
  • Week 10: Web Application Hacking (17)
  • Week 11: SQL Injection (13)
  • Week 12: Web Services (18)
  • Week 13: Evasion Techniques (13)
  • Week 14: Review of all topics (11)

Copyright © 2025 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in