New information about the malware attack on WhatsApp has been revealed. A high official told Economic Times that the CERT-In (Indian Computer Emergency Response Team) had issued an advisory three days before Facebook alerted the government to the attack.

The first advisory was released in May CERT-In is the nodal cybersecurity agency of the country. It identified the threat of malware attack with the help of internal tools and on May 17, the first advisory was released for WhatsApp users. CERT-In had placed this malware attack in the category of extremely dangerous and said that it will attack through WhatsApp voice call.

Whatsapp also alerted In late May, WhatsApp also alerted the agency about this. However, it was not stated that the malware used in this attack is Pegasus. Pegasus malware has been developed by the Israeli surveillance firm NSO Group.
121 spyware attack attempts on Indians

A few months after this, in September, this American company also wrote a letter to CERT-In and warned about this spyware. It was said that spyware attacks have been tried on 121 Indians and this has affected 20 Indian users who use WhatsApp.

Affected users may still be in danger

WhatsApp told the Indian government that it has corrected this threat. With this, WhatsApp has also not been able to understand whether the attack has actually happened or not. However, WhatsApp has not yet clarified whether the users who have been attacked by this spyware are now out of it or are still in the grip of this attack.

Advised to update the app

On May 15 this year, WhatsApp told the Economic Times that it had advised users to update WhatsApp after identifying spyware. However, WhatsApp did not mention the name of the spyware at that time. WhatsApp has said that it has identified this spyware in May and fixed it internally.

Whatsapp did the case

On 29 October, WhatsApp filed a case against the NSO Group. It is being claimed that the NSO is behind this attack. In this spyware attack, 1400 devices from 20 countries were hacked.