According to a 2023 report published by the cybersecurity firm Kaspersky, 34% of unauthorized GB WhatsApp APKs have backdoor vulnerabilities, which provide users’ confidential conversations with a 6.8 times higher probability of being hijacked than the original app. For instance, hackers exploited the GB WhatsApp APK v17.8 SQL injection weakness in a 2022 data breach attack in India and plundered chat history of 120,000 victims within 72 hours. All messages were marketed on the dark web at $0.003, and their combined illicit profits totaled over $430,000. Technical analysis shows that versions of the key derivation function (KDF) of its end-to-end encryption protocol have decreased from the official standard of 1 million to 50,000, decreasing brute force cracking time from the theoretical minimum of 17 years to 4 months and decreasing the encryption strength by 89%.
As far as permission misuse is concerned, GB WhatsApp APK requires a total of 38 system permissions (14 for the original app), where the misuse rates of the “Read Contacts” and “Access Location” permissions are 29% and 34% respectively. Cases broken by the Brazilian police in 2023 revealed that criminal gangs monitored users’ conversations real-time with the help of the hacked version of GB WhatsApp APK (v19.2), activating the keylogger to capture 23 input events per second, which increased the chances of bank account theft up to 17%. The research also found that the encryption deviation rate of its message database (msgstore.db) reached 12%, 400 times higher than the 0.03% risk of the official version.
Critical compliance risks – GB WhatsApp APK violated Article 32 of the EU GDPR data protection regulation. Its chat logs are stored by default in unencrypted AWS S3 buckets. There were 47 data breach cases between 2021 and 2023, involving 2.3 million users. For instance, in 2023, a certain German company was fined 1.9 million euros (equivalent to 8.5% of its net profit over one year) by the regulatory body for its employees’ use of GB WhatsApp APK to exchange customers’ personal information. Additionally, the server log retention time is up to 90 days (official is 7 days), and this increases the probability of user behavior trajectory leakage when law enforcement agencies collect evidence to 93%.
User behavior data shows that only 23% of GB WhatsApp APK users enable two-factor authentication (the proportion of official users is 76%), and 35% of backup files are not encrypted and are kept on local devices. In a SIM card hijacking incident in South Africa in 2022, attackers brought back chat histories using unencrypted backup files, with the greatest loss of as much as 12,000 US dollars per user. Security experts point out that even when using VPNS (such as WireGuard protocol), metadata of the GB WhatsApp APK client (such as online status and device model) still leaks to third-party servers at a frequency rate of 2 times per second, and their privacy exposure is 7.3 times bigger compared to official apps.
Although the developers claim “military-grade security”, reverse engineering shows that GB WhatsApp APK’s code obtuscation rate is merely 65% (official rate is 95%), and hackers can exploit its encryption logic within a mean time of 72 hours. Experiments by the MIT Media Lab in 2023 found that on Pixel 7 Pro phones, the CVE-2023-4863 vulnerability of GB WhatsApp APK was able to decrypt previous chat history in just 10 seconds with a success rate of up to 89%. If enterprise users need secure communication, they should choose solutions that are FIPS 140-3 certified (such as the Signal protocol), whose end-to-end encryption coverage rate is 99.99%, and the key management cost ($0.002 per piece) is only 1/120 of the patching cost of the GB WhatsApp APK vulnerability.