Pavel Durov, the creator of the instant messaging service Telegram, declared Monday in his Telegram channel that ‘WhatsApp has been a surveillance tool for 13 years and that users should avoid the messaging programme’. He claimed that WhatsApp has problems that endanger the data of its users each year. ‘I’m not trying to convince folks to use Telegram here. Telegram doesn’t require any further advertising with its 700M+ active users and 2M+ daily signups. You can use any messaging software you like, but avoid WhatsApp because it has been used as a spying tool for 13 years, advised Durov in his YouTube channel’.
He said that a security flaw that WhatsApp revealed last week may provide hackers complete access to anything on users’ phones. Sending a malicious video or starting a video call is all it takes for a hacker to access all the data on a person’s phone. According to Durov, it is not true if one believes that updating WhatsApp to the most recent version will make their data safe. He further mentioned that the same problem was seen in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020. According to Durov, WhatsApp did not have end-to-end encryption before 2016.
‘We learn about a new WhatsApp bug every year that puts everything on their users’ smartphones at danger. This implies that there is a strong likelihood that a new security hole already exists there. Such problems are not unintentional; rather, they are hidden trapdoors. If one backdoor is found and needs to be closed, another one is added,’ he stated. No matter how wealthy a person is, according to the founder of Telegram, if they have WhatsApp installed on their phone, everyone can view all of their data.
‘For this reason, I deleted WhatsApp from all of my devices years ago. Installing it opens a door for access to your phone’, according to Durov. This comes following a security alert that WhatsApp published in September. It made a patch available for a bug that might let a hacker infect a person’s device with malware while they are on a video conversation. The security hole has a critical rating. Another issue it pointed out may allow an attacker to insert a specially made video file.
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