Durov claims there are intentional back doors in Whatsapp.
Durov has criticized Whatsapp before. AOP/Reuters
Founder of instant messaging service Telegram Pavel Durov has instructed people to use any messaging app other than Whatsapp if they want to prevent their phones from being hacked.
– I’m not trying to get people to switch to Telegram. Telegram does not need additional advertising, Durov wrote In Telegram, referring to the number of users of the service.
Telegram has more than 700 million active users. Whatsapp just reached a whopping two billion users worldwide.
– You can use any instant messaging app, but stay away from Whatsapp – it has been a surveillance tool for 13 years.
Last week, Durvo referred to Whatsapp as a patch vulnerabilitywhich made it possible for hackers to hijack a victim’s phone by sending them a malicious video.
– Hackers would have had full rights to everything on Whatsapp users’ phones, Durov wrote in Telegram.
– Every year we come across new problems in Whatsapp that put users’ phones at risk. It doesn’t matter if you are the richest person in the world – if you have Whatsapp installed on your phone, all your data in all applications can be accessed, Durov wrote referring By Jeff Bezos for phone hacking allegedly using Whatsapp in 2020.
According to Durov, these are “designed back doors” that enable authorities and hackers to bypass encryption and other security measures.
Whatsapp’s parent company, Meta, commented on Durov’s writing to a reporter on the subject For the Independent. Meta denied the allegations:
– This is complete rubbish, the communication was commented on.
Are there any grounds for the claims?
Data security expert Zak Doffman farted in Forbes in more detail Durov’s Telegram post.
The first thing Doffman points out is that WhatsApp patched the vulnerability, saying it was discovered internally by the company and fixed before there was evidence of its exploitation. According to Doffman, the target of exploiting such a vulnerability would likely be political or financial actors.
Doffman points out that similar vulnerabilities have also been detected in other instant messaging services, including Telegram.
According to Doffman, people should be concerned about the most common scams that try to take over accounts. Such methods include, for example, phishing and scam messages.
Another thing Doffman says you should be more concerned about is end-to-end encryption. In this context, the magazine highlights the fact that Whatsapp is owned by Meta, and Meta is the world’s largest and most successful data collector. End-to-end encryption adds an extra layer of security to conversations, where only those in the conversation can see the messages. The service provider therefore does not have access to them.
If end-to-end encryption is enabled, the content can only be compromised when the encryption is decrypted by the device participating in the conversation or via an external backup service.
According to Doffman, the irony of the uproar is that at the same time Durov is pointing the finger at Whatsapp, Telegram is by default less secure. Outside of secret chats, Telegram only encrypts chats between users and servers – not between users themselves.
– In reality, this is a much bigger problem for large numbers of users than the vulnerability patched by Whatsapp, Doffman writes.
– Although Telegram has policies and procedures in place to protect content and spy on users, the lack of end-to-end protection means that there are no technical walls for this per se.
Doffman defends Whatsapp, saying “there’s really no need to delete it”.