Kaspersky warns of a “spyware version” of the WhatsApp application threatening Android devices

Kaspersky Lab has warned of the spread of an unofficial modified version of the WhatsApp application, through which malware can be spread to infiltrate smart devices running Android systems.

The company said in a statement on the matter: “Kaspersky Lab experts discovered a sample of the WhatsApp application that contains previously unknown malware. This is a Trojan type of software that spies on Android devices, and it is called CanesSpy. Unofficial modified models of the WhatsApp application contain... This software was published for some time on Telegram channels in Arabic and Azerbaijani.”

The statement indicated, "The unofficial modified versions of WhatsApp for Android systems provide users with the option of delayed publishing and some other features, but the malicious software they contain can penetrate phones and access contact lists, information about electronic accounts on the device, as well as access to documents." It is also possible to make recordings via the devices’ microphones.”

Experts at Kaspersky Lab noted that the total number of subscribers to the most popular Telegram channels that publish unofficial models of the aforementioned applications reaches nearly two million users, and last October alone the company prevented more than 340,000 cyber attacks in more than a hundred countries. The largest number of these attacks were recorded in Azerbaijan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Turkey, and Egypt, and users from Russia were also exposed to them.

China warns of "genetic weapons" capable of targeting specific ethnicities

China has sounded the alarm about the potential dangers of what it calls "genetic weapons" that could be a powerful weapon of mass destruction, according to the Global Times.

On Monday, October 20, 2023, China's Ministry of State Security issued a statement on WeChat warning that a foreign NGO had recruited Chinese "volunteers" to conduct "species research and collect biodiversity distribution data" under the guise of biological species research.

The Ministry did not mention the names of the countries concerned, nor did it provide evidence to support this claim. But she stressed that the NGO not only had ties with the government of a “certain country” but also continuously transferred the information obtained abroad, a fact that represented a potential threat to “China’s biosafety and environmental security.”

The publication notes that compared to conventional biological and chemical weapons, genetic weapons are “more concealable, deceptive, easy to spread, and harmful in the long term.”

According to the Global Times , if an AI model is fed a sufficient number of human genetic samples, it can analyze and understand the unique genetic characteristics of each ethnic group.

“Maintaining biosecurity is a shared responsibility among all members of society,” the ministry said. “If there are a sufficient number of human genetic samples, scientists can analyze and understand the unique genetic characteristics of each nation and race.”

A number of specialists explained: “If used by individuals or organizations with ulterior motives, genetic weapons could be developed to kill targets of a pre-determined race, and thus selectively attack targets with specific racial genes.”

Although the existence of such weapons is not a new claim, it has long been dismissed by the mainstream scientific community as a "conspiracy theory."

However, the Chinese ministry says that so-called "ethnic bioweapons" are designed specifically for specific ethnic groups and not just any human.

Last June, US presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed that “the Chinese are developing ethnic biological weapons,” noting that the United States is working to develop such technology as well.