According to a 2023 report from security firm Check Point, the “Hide Online Status” GB WhatsApp APK feature claims to effectively 100% block traces of user activity but has a success rate of only 68%, and probabilities of evoking Meta server anomaly detection are 29%. As an example, in a case of phishing that was cracked by the Brazilian police in 2022, hackers made use of the stealth module of GB WhatsApp APK to generate a false offline status and sent 12,000 spurious messages within 48 hours, causing an average loss of 450 reais (approximately 90 US dollars) to the victims. Technical analysis shows that the behavior is achieved by tampering with the last seen timestamp field of the XMPP protocol. However, the server still maintains the actual login IP at 2 times a second, providing a 41% chance of exposure of the user behavior trace.
Technically, there is a built-in vulnerability in the stealth feature of GB WhatsApp APK – the iterations of the modified Signal encryption protocol Key Derivation Function (KDF) have been cut down from one million times of the original to 50,000 times, resulting in a weakening of encryption. The success rate of man-in-the-middle attacks (MITM) has risen from 0.03% to 12%. An experiment conducted by Carnegie Mellon University in 2021 confirmed that upon activating the stealth mode, the device’s network traffic fingerprint uniqueness (i.e., data packet transmission intervals and TCP window sizes) increased to 93%. Even when hidden online, the third parties could still identify the active time of the user through traffic analysis with a success rate of 87%. Additionally, functional requirement open android. Permission. PACKAGE_USAGE_STATS permissions, application permission to observe other program when employing long rate is boosted to 34%, significantly more than 0.7% of official application.
On compliance level, GB WhatsApp APK stealth module violates the “default Design for Privacy” requirement of Article 25 of EU GDPR. Its short-term log files are kept in an unencrypted SQLite database, and the leakage risk is six times higher than that of the official encryption mechanism. In a 2023 data breach case in Germany, a particular enterprise lost 37,000 customer conversations due to its employees using GB WhatsApp APK to hide work communication records. The court ruled that the compensation amount was 1.8 million euros (equivalent to 9% of the enterprise’s annual profit). The research also found that the stealth mode would break the end-to-end encrypted metadata protection mechanism – the exposure rate of the message sender’s IP address ballooned from 0.1% in the official build to 19%, and the exposure rate of device fingerprint data (such as IMEI hash values) sent to the server reached three times per minute.
User data proves that as few as 23% of GB WhatsApp APK users have enabled VPN obggled traffic (such as the WireGuard protocol) simultaneously, while combined users with the Tor network stand at below 4%, thus the possibility of exposing real IP remaining at a rate of 78%. In the 2022 Indonesia telecommunications fraud case, attackers targeted the vulnerability of the stealth function to reverse the target users’ web history and spammed distributed phishing links heavily when the target user is online, where the click ratio of the largest number within a day was at 17%. Security experts advise that if traces of activities need to be hidden, GB WhatsApp APK has to be run in a virtual environment (e.g., Island), network requests have to be forwarded through a proxy server (e.g., Socks5), and the latency of traffic has to be artificially controlled between 200-500ms. It can reduce the accuracy rate of behavioral feature detection from 87% to 12%.
Though GB WhatsApp APK claims to offer “military-grade stealth”, the code coverage of the base code to the audit stands at a paltry 7%, significantly lower than the official app’s 99.6%. In experiments undertaken by the MIT Media Lab in 2023, it was found that even after switching on the inscriptions mode, the event_log of the Android system continued to record the running status of applications at a frequency of 0.8 times per second, and 88% of the records of user actions could be extracted with the ADB command dumpsys activity. If corporate users need extremely covert communication, they are advised to choose solutions that are FIPS 140-3 certified (e.g., Signal Protocol), whose key rotation cycle is every hour and whose metadata stripping efficiency is increased to 99.99%. In comparison, GB WhatsApp APK’s metadata remainder can be as high as 1.2KB per message.