Is the website of the manufacturer of Chingari Globussoft infected with malware? That’s what well-known French security researcher Robert Baptiste has said, using the pseudonym Elliot Alderson on Twitter. Publishing on Twitter Baptiste said: “The Globussoft website, the company behind Chingari, the so-called Indian alternative TikTok, has been compromised.” He noted that the site had a malware script on every page, which redirects users to web pages. At the time of this writing, Chingari’s team was unable to respond to a request for comment.
However, on Twitter, Chingari co-founder Sumit Ghosh aware Say: “Thanks for pointing me out the wp problem, Chingari was incubated under Globussoft and built by us, Chingari application/website security and our users are not compromised by any of this. It is stored securely on AWS dedicated and secure instances. We will fix the wp problem soon. ” He additional“The Globussoft website and the chingari app have very different security/engineering teams and are completely unrelated. Chingari will soon be an independent company.”
According to Baptiste Send, the site has been injected with a drop script to redirect users and included a report where this redirect is going. In response to Baptiste, another Twitter user (CitizenK, whose bio says he’s a UI developer) wrote BitDefender found cryptojacking malware on the Globussoft website. Furthermore, using the verification of the Sucuri website security service site, it found multiple instances of detected malware: Gadgets 360 checked and tested various sites, including the Chingari website, and only the Globussoft site triggered these warnings.
It should be noted that the presence of this malware does not point to any problem in the Chingari application, although, as Baptiste pointed out in his final publication on the subject, it raises questions.
Chingari was released on Google Play and the App Store and crossed 25 lakh downloads last week. The free app looks a lot like TikTok, but the remaining reviews on Google Play raised issues like the app is slow, only showing a few videos, and crashing from time to time. It seems like a lot of support is due to the app being made in India. A review on Google Play noted: “Downloaded to promote Indian developers, but compared to TikTok it still has a long way to go to be mainstream.”
After TikTok, as well as 58 other ‘Chinese’ apps, were banned by the government on Monday, there has been a lot of interest in alternatives that people can use instead, and Chingari along with another app, Mitron, won a lot of Attention. On Wednesday Zee5 launched another TikTok HiPi competitor.
After TikTok was banned, Chingari co-founder Sumit Ghosh turned to social media to share how many people were downloading the app and how many videos were being watched. In a statement to Gadgets 360, Ghosh added: “This is a very good step taken by the Government of India and the Indian IT Ministry. For a long time, TikTok has been spying on users and sending the data to China.”
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