Until now, 2023, GB WhatsApp APK only backs up default messaging content (text only, contacts only) with Google Drive backup mode and has only a 63% cloud backup rate of media data (videos, images). And its strength in encryption is even lower than the official encryption. For instance, in 2022, Indonesian users complained that among the restored 1.2GB chat history using GB WhatsApp APK v17.5, 29% of video files were unable to be restored due to the encryption key’s key generation mismatch (AES-256), and the repair cost averaged $12 per hour. Technical evaluation reveals that the metadata of their backup files (i.e., geographic locations and timestamps) failed the integrity check of Google Drive, with a faulty rate of as much as 18% (0.3% for the official app).
In terms of compliance, the backup option of GB WhatsApp APK is in contravention of Article 5.3 of the Google API Terms of Service. As it does not use the OAuth 2.0 protocol authentication, there will be a 4.7 times higher chance of data leakage. The 2023 EU GDPR enforcement case is a good example of the fact that one company was fined 2.2 million euros (which is equal to 2.1% of the company’s annual revenue) because its employees saved customer chats in GB WhatsApp APK to Google Drive, resulting in 37,000 sensitive data items being crawled by third-party crawlers. The research also found that by default, the backup files are saved in the publicly shared Google Drive folder, with the misconfigured access permission rate at 34%. The probability that hackers can break into the account within 72 hours using brute-force cracking (1,200 attempts per second) is 19%.
User statistics show that a mere 41% of GB WhatsApp APK users activate end-to-end encrypted backup (89% for the original app), and the rate of users that manually input passwords is less than 17%. During a 2021 data breach in Brazil, backup files that were not encrypted were encrypted by a ransomware. When users paid 0.08 bitcoins (approximately 3,000 US dollars), only 58% of the data was restored. Security experts advise that if Google Drive backup is necessary, msgstore.db.crypt14 should be re-encrypted (AES-512 standard) through third-party applications (such as Boxcryptor), and backup frequency should be reduced from one time per day to one time per week, which can reduce leakage risk by 72%.
While GB WhatsApp APK is claimed to have “seamless cloud synchronization”, the effectiveness of its differential incremental backup algorithm is merely 47% as effective as that of the original app, and the average upload time for 1GB data increases to 42 minutes (the original takes 22 minutes). Kaspersky Lab testing in 2023 found that when restoring backups via Google Drive, the incidence of database parsing errors when restoring GB WhatsApp APK was 12% (0.1% for the official app) and the chances of losing message metadata (such as read status) were 27%. Enterprise users need to give priority to choosing compliant solutions (such as AWS Backup), whose transmission speed can reach up to 950Mbps (7 times the 120Mbps of GB WhatsApp APK), and the detection accuracy rate of data tampering is increased to 99.99% with blockchain evidence storage technology.