Telegram Founder Calls WhatsApp A ‘Surveillance Tool’

According to Pavel Durov, anyone with WhatsApp on their phone makes all their data accessible

Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov on Thursday called the messaging service WhatsApp a “monitoring tool”, saying security issues periodically discovered on the app are actually intentionally put in place.

“Hackers might have full (!) access to everything on WhatsApp users’ phones,” Durov said in a post on Telegram.

“This was possible thanks to a security issue disclosed by WhatsApp itself last week. All a hacker had to do to control your phone was send you a malicious video or start a video call with you on WhatsApp,” he added.

Last month, WhatsApp notified that it had fixed a vulnerability that might have allowed remote code execution via video files or video calls.

The Telegram founder warned that updating to the latest version of WhatsApp would “not really” protect users, as a host of similar vulnerabilities have been discovered in recent years.

“Every year we learn of a problem in WhatsApp that puts everything on their users’ devices at risk. Which means it’s almost certain that a new security hole already exists there. “, said Durov.

“Such problems are not accidental – they are planted backdoors. If a backdoor is discovered and needs to be removed, another is added,” he pointed out.

The CEO of Telegram claimed that anyone who has WhatsApp on their phone makes all their data accessible on that device, adding that he removed WhatsApp from his devices “years ago”.

Dourov stressed that he was not trying to push people to switch to Telegram, saying “Telegram doesn’t need any extra promotion.”

“You can use any messaging app you want, but avoid WhatsApp, which has been a surveillance tool for 13 years,” he warned.

Pavel Durov has already warned once morest using WhatsApp in the past. In May 2019, he published an article titled “Why WhatsApp will never be secure”, writing at the time that “there hasn’t been a single day in WhatsApp’s 10-year journey that this service has been secured.”

But the Telegram app also suffered from vulnerabilities that hackers also exploited.

Earlier this year, cybersecurity firm Mandiant reported that malware called GRAMDOOR was being used by Iranian hackers as a command-and-control system to deliver malware to infected systems.

Israeli cybersecurity firm Check Point warned in 2021 that hackers were increasingly using Telegram as a command and control system to distribute malware. Even when Telegram is not installed or used on the target devices, hackers can remotely send malicious commands and operations to the targets through a Telegram “bot”.