WHATSAPP users have been warned against a dangerous new malware campaign, which hopes to trick the cross-platform messenger users into installing an executable file.
By AARON BROWN
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GETTY
Cybercriminals circulating malware have set their sights on WhatsApp users, researchers have discovered.
The malware is being distributed in emails, which look as if they have been sent from an official WhatsApp account, researchers at Comodo Labs have revealed.
Criminals hope to trick WhatsApp users into opening the email – and downloading the attached virus.
Messages from the criminals contain suggestive subject lines including, "you have obtained a voice notification", "an audio memo was missed", "a brief audio recording has been delivered" and "a short vocal recording was obtained".
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Some WhatsApp users are being sent other notifications too, including a fake notification about a new video note, Comodo has confirmed.
None of these emails originate from a WhatsApp email address – but are "disguised with an umbrella branding", the security firm added.
Each of these malicious messages contains a compressed ZIP file, which will unleash the hidden malware inside.
The malware usually replicates itself into different system folders, adding itself into an auto-run in the computer’s registry.
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"Cybercriminals are becoming more and more like marketers – trying to use creative subject lines to have unsuspecting emails be clicked and opened to spread malware," said Fatih Orhan, Director of Technology for Comodo and the Comodo Antispam Labs.
"As a company, Comodo is working diligently in creating innovative technology solutions that stay a step ahead of the cybercriminals, protect and secure endpoints, and keep enterprises and IT environments safe."
WhatsApp is currently the most popular cross-platform messaging app with more than 900 million users worldwide.
The Facebook-owned service crashed on New Years Eve, leaving millions of well-wishers unable to message friends and family at the start of the new year.
WhatsApp Inc., was founded in 2009 by Brian Acton and Jan Koum, both former employees of Yahoo!. After Koum and Acton left Yahoo! in September 2007, the duo travelled to South America as a break from work.[9] At one point they applied for a job at Facebook but were rejected.[9] For the rest of the following years Koum relied on his $400,000 savings from Yahoo!. In January 2009, after purchasing an iPhone and realizing that the seven-month-old App Store was about to spawn a whole new industry of apps, he started visiting his friend, Alex Fishman in West San Jose where the three would discuss "...having statuses next to individual names of the people," but this was not possible without an iPhone developer, so Fishman introduced Koum to Igor Solomennikov, a developer in Russia that he had found on
RentACoder.com. Koum almost immediately chose the name "WhatsApp" because it sounded like "what's up", and a week later on his birthday, on February 24, 2009, he incorporated WhatsApp Inc. in California. However, early WhatsApp kept crashing or getting stuck and at a particular point, Koum felt like giving up and looking for a new job, upon which Acton encouraged him to wait for a "few more months".[9]
In June 2009, Apple launched push notifications, letting developers ping users when they were not using an app. Koum updated WhatsApp so that each time the user changed their statuses, it would ping everyone in the user's network.[9] WhatsApp 2.0 was released with a messaging component and the active users suddenly swelled to 250,000. Koum visited Acton, who was still unemployed while managing another unsuccessful startup and decided to join the company.[9] In October Acton persuaded five ex-Yahoo! friends to invest $250,000 in seed funding, and as a result was granted co-founder status and a stake. He officially joined on November 1.[9] After months at beta stage, the application eventually launched in November 2009 exclusively on the App Store for the iPhone. Koum then hired an old friend who lived in Los Angeles, Chris Peiffer, to make the BlackBerry version, which arrived two months later.[9]
WhatsApp was switched from a free to paid service to avoid growing too fast, mainly because the primary cost was sending verification texts to users. In December 2009 WhatsApp for the iPhone was updated to send photos. By early 2011, WhatsApp was in the top 20 of all apps in Apple's U.S. App Store.[9]
In April 2011, the founders agreed to take $7 million from Sequoia Capital on top of their $250,000 seed funding, after months of negotiation with Sequoia partner Jim Goetz.[9] According to Goetz, the venture capital firm originally discovered WhatsApp through an App store tracking system they developed called 'early bird', at a time when the app was much more popular in other countries than in the US. However, it took months for the VC firm to track down Koum and Acton, given that the company didn't have a publicly available address nor signage at the time. All Goetz knew was that they were located in Mountain View, and Sequoia partners "literally walked the streets of Mountain View to see if [they] could intersect with [Koum and Acton]."[10]
By February 2013, WhatsApp's user base had swollen to about 200 million active users and its staff to 50. Sequoia invested another $50 million, valuing WhatsApp at $1.5 billion.[9]
In a December 2013 blog post, WhatsApp claimed that 400 million active users use the service each month.[11] As of April 22, 2014, WhatsApp had over 500 million monthly active users, 700 million photos and 100 million videos are shared each day, and the messaging system handles more than 10 billion messages each day.[12] On August 24, 2014, Koum announced on his Twitter account that WhatsApp had over 600 million active users worldwide. WhatsApp added about 25 million new users every month or 833,000 active users per day.[13][14] With 65 million active users, about 10% of the total worldwide users, India is the largest single country in terms of number of users.[15]
In January 2015, WhatsApp was the most globally popular messaging app with more than 600 million active users.[13] In April 2015, WhatsApp reached 800 million active users.[16] By September 2015, the user base had grown to 900 million.[5]
As of November 30, 2015, the Android client for WhatsApp started making links to another messenger called Telegram unclickable and uncopiable.[17][18][19] It has been confirmed by multiple sources that WhatsApp is actively blocking domains with the word telegram in the source code of the Android app.[19] WhatsApp has not yet given an explanation for this behavior.
Acquisition by Facebook
On February 19, 2014, months after a venture capital financing round at a $1.5 billion valuation,[20] Facebook announced it was acquiring WhatsApp for US$19 billion, its largest acquisition to date.[8] Facebook, which was advised by Allen & Co, paid $4 billion in cash, $12 billion in Facebook shares, and an additional $3 billion in restricted stock units granted to WhatsApp's founders (advised by Morgan Stanley), Koum andActon.[21] Employee stock was scheduled to vest over four years subsequent to closing.[8] The transaction was the largest purchase of a company backed by venture capitalists to date.[7] Days after the announcement, WhatsApp users experienced a loss of service, leading to anger across social media.[22][23]
The acquisition caused a considerable number of users to move, or try out other message services as well. Telegram claimed to have seen 8 million additional downloads of its app.[24] Line claimed to have seen 2 million new users for its service.[25]
At a keynote presentation at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February 2014, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp was closely related to the Internet.orgvision.[26][27] According to a TechCrunch article, Zuckerberg's vision for Internet.org was as follows: "The idea, he said, is to develop a group of basic internet services that would be free of charge to use – 'a 911 for the internet.' These could be a social networking service like Facebook, a messaging service, maybe search and other things like weather. Providing a bundle of these free of charge to users will work like a gateway drug of sorts – users who may be able to afford data services and phones these days just don’t see the point of why they would pay for those data services. This would give them some context for why they are important, and that will lead them to paying for more services like this – or so the hope goes."[26]
On May 9, 2014, the government of Iran announced that it had proposed to block the access to WhatsApp service to Iranian residents. "The reason for this is the assumption of WhatsApp by the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who is an American Zionist," said Abdolsamad Khorramabadi, head of the country's Committee on Internet Crimes. Subsequently Iranian president Hassan Rouhani issued an order to the Ministry of ICT to stop filtering WhatsApp.[28][29]
Just three days after announcing that WhatsApp had been purchased by Facebook, Koum said they were working to introduce voice calls in the coming months. He also advanced that new mobile phones would be sold in Germany with the WhatsApp brand, as their main goal was to be in all smartphones.[30]
By early January 2015, WhatsApp had 700 million monthly active users with over 30 billion messages being sent every day.[31] In April 2015, Forbes predicted that between 2012 and 2018, the telecommunications industry will lose a combined total of $386 billion because of OTT services like WhatsApp and Skype.[32] That month, WhatsApp had over 800 million active users.[33]
Platform support
After months at beta stage, the application eventually launched in November 2009 exclusively on the App Store for the iPhone. In January 2010, support for BlackBerry smartphones was added, and subsequently forSymbian OS in May 2010 and for Android OS in August 2010. In August 2011 a beta for Nokia's non-smartphone OS Series 40 was added. A month later support for Windows Phone was added, followed byBlackBerry 10 in March 2013.[34] In April 2015, support for Samsung's Tizen OS was added.[35] An unofficial port has been released for the MeeGo-based Nokia N9 called Wazzap,[36] as well as a port for theMaemo-based Nokia N900 called Yappari.[37]
The oldest device capable of running WhatsApp is the Symbian-based Nokia N95 released in March 2007.
In August 2014, WhatsApp released an update to its Android app, adding support for Android Wear smartwatches.[38]
In 2014 an unofficial open source plug-in called whatsapp-purple was released for Pidgin, implementing its XMPP protocol and making it possible to use WhatsApp on a Windows or Linux PC.[39]
On January 21, 2015, WhatsApp launched WhatsApp Web, a web client[40] which can be used through a web browser by syncing with the mobile device's connection.
WhatsApp Web
WhatsApp was officially made available for PCs through a web client, under the name WhatsApp Web, in late January 2015 through an announcement made by Koum on his Facebook page: "Our web client is simply an extension of your phone: the web browser mirrors conversations and messages from your mobile device—this means all of your messages still live on your phone". The WhatsApp user's handset must still be connected to the Internet for the browser application to function. All major desktop browsers are supported except for Microsoft Internet Explorer. WhatsApp Web's user interface is based on the default Android one.
As of January 21, 2015, the desktop version was only available to Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone users. Later on, it also added support for iOS, Nokia Series 40, and Nokia S60 (Symbian).[41][42]
An unofficial derivative called WhatsAppTime has been developed, which is a standard Win32 application for PCs and supports notifications through the Windows notification area.[43]
Technical
WhatsApp uses a customized version of the open standard Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP).[44] Upon installation, it creates a user account using one's phone number as the username (JabberID:
[phone number]@s.whatsapp.net).
WhatsApp software automatically compares all the phone numbers from the device's address book with its central database of WhatsApp users to automatically add contacts to the user's WhatsApp contact list. Previously the Android and S40 versions used an MD5-hashed, reversed-version of the phone's IMEI as password,[45] while the iOS version used the phone's Wi-Fi MAC address instead of IMEI.[46][47] A 2012 update now generates a random password on the server side.[48]
Some Dual SIM devices may not be compatible with WhatsApp, though there are some workarounds for this.[49]
In January 2015, WhatsApp introduced a voice calling feature; this helped WhatsApp to attract a completely different segment of the user population.[50]
Multimedia messages are sent by uploading the image, audio or video to be sent to an HTTP server and then sending a link to the content along with its Base64 encoded thumbnail (if applicable).[51]
WhatsApp follows a ‘store and forward’ mechanism for exchanging messages between two users. When a user sends a message, it first travels to the WhatsApp server where it is stored. Then the server repeatedly requests the receiver acknowledge receipt of the message. As soon as the message is acknowledged, the server drops the message; it is no longer available in database of server. WhatsApp server keeps the message only for 30 days in its database when it is not delivered (when the receiver is not active on WhatsApp for 30 days).[52][self-published source?]
Google Now is also going to support direct message sending protocol from its voice command. This service will be available on different messaging services and the highlighted one is Whatsapp. Google Now will provide this service for free and WhatsApp users will be able to send and receive messages on Google Now.[53]
