The Russian "Neo". Pavel Durov, founder of Russia's leading social network VKontakte on messenger ... [+]
Dump WhatsApp already.
WhatsApp doesn’t only fail to protect its users’ messages, it is consistently being used as a Trojan horse to spy on their users’ non-WhatsApp content, including photos kept on their phones. Founder of rival app Telegram, Pavel Durov, says people should just delete it.
“Unless you are cool with all of your photos and messages becoming public one day, you should delete WhatsApp from your phone,” Durov said on his Telegram channel to his 335,000 followers on Wednesday. It’s a small number, and Telegram’s user base is around 200 million active monthly users versus 1.6 billion for WhatsApp.
But Telegram, perhaps due to its size, is not subject to the same hacks and highly publicized security breaches as WhatsApp.
Durov made a name for himself not because of the social media network VKontakte that he created in Russia, but because of his defiance of Russian police investigators when they asked for security keys to unlock messages on a phone belonging to someone involved in the 2017 St. Petersburg metro station bombing. Telegram users and tech security geeks lauded Durov’s stand against the authorities, with privacy rights activists last year holding up an image of Durov dressed as a saint.
Demonstrators with a icon-stylised painting depicting Pavel Durov protest against the blocking of ... [+]
So it is no surprise that Durov would use the recent backdoor discoveries in WhatsApp as a means to go after his commercial and, in many ways, ideological rival.
WhatsApp users were urged this week to update to the latest version of the app after a second security vulnerability was found. The discovery related to a malicious video found in India that would allow hackers to access people’s messages if they shared the video file with people on the app. Facebook says it fixed the bug this week, but warned it was still a problem for people using an older version of the application.
To anyone who knows Durov, or at least the character he and his fans have created, he sees himself as fighting spy agencies, an underground defender of privacy.
“Facebook has long been part of surveillance programs, long before it acquired WhatsApp,” he wrote, linking to two articles: a 2013 piece on the PRISM software made public by Edward Snowden published on The Verge and another one from the same year that ran in USA Today. (Of course, James Clapper denies everything.)
The USA Today report highlighted that government intel gathering agencies were harvesting data from the servers of companies including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Skype, YouTube and Apple, to name a few. It was all based on the PRISM story.
Durov also points out that WhatsApp founder Brian Acton admitted in 2018, even if tongue-in-cheek, that he sold his users’ privacy when selling to Facebook.
Following this week’s discovery of the malicious MP4 video, Facebook said there was no evidence that hackers had exploited anything because all of the videos are stored on Google or Apple cloud servers.
Durov’s guess is that many people had their devices hacked without them knowing. “A security vulnerability of this magnitude is bound to have been exploited,” he says. “Just like the previous WhatsApp backdoor had been used against human rights activists and journalists ... the data obtained as a result of the exploitation of such WhatsApp backdoors will now be shared with other countries by U.S. agencies.”
The data sought is almost always in line with criminal investigations, most notably murders and terrorist attacks. But privacy rights activists, of which Durov is one of them, believe the data can be used for other purposes against public figures, or in private legal matters, without the knowledge of the person whose data was stolen.
WhatsApp fixed its most recent security hole, urging users to update their app to include the latest ... [+]
Durov appears rarely on his channel. He usually only writes to announce the rare product change at Telegram, or—lately—to criticize WhatsApp.
He said in May that WhatsApp would never be secure, following another backdoor security breach requiring an upgrade to the app.
Back then, Durov suggested the FBI could have forced WhatsApp or Facebook to include backdoors—secret entrances through WhatsApp encryption—in order to access their programming.
“For WhatsApp to become a privacy-oriented service, it has to risk losing entire markets and clashing with authorities in their home country,” he wrote.
In March 2019, Telegram said it gained 3 million users in 24 hours as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp experienced security breaches.
