Researchers Discovered Counterfeit Phones with Backdoor to Hack WhatsApp Accounts

Budget Android device models that are replicas of popular smartphone brands are infected with numerous trojans devised to target the WhatsApp and WhatsApp Business messaging apps. Doctor Web discovered the malware in the system partitions of at least four different smartphones in July 2022: P48pro, redmi note 8, Note30u, and Mate40. 

The cybersecurity firm said in a report published, “These incidents are united by the fact that the attacked devices were copycats of famous brand-name models. Moreover, instead of having one of the latest OS versions installed on them with the corresponding information displayed in the device details (for example, Android 10), they had the long outdated 4.4.2 version.”

The tampering specifically affects two files, “/system/lib/libcutils.so” and “/system/lib/libmtd.so,” which have been modified in such a way that when the libcutils.so system library is used by any app, it activates the execution of a trojan embedded in libmtd.so. If the apps that use the libraries are WhatsApp and WhatsApp Business, libmtd.so launches a third backdoor whose primary function is to download and install additional plugins from a remote location.

The researchers stated, “The danger of the discovered backdoors and the modules they download is that they operate in suc

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