Cybersecurity

WhatsApp likely part of a spy program, claims Telegram founder Pavel Durov

WhatsApp has been surrounded by a number of controversies in the past couple of days. First it was the privacy concerns stemming from the Israeli security firm NSO using vulnerabilities in WhatsApp's platform to spy on users, then it was a corrupted video file allowing hackers access to hack into users' smartphones. Now, Telegram founder Pavel Durov has written a post on his channel claiming that WhatsApp is a part of a spy program.

"WhatsApp doesn't only fail to protect your WhatsApp messages - this app is being consistently used as a Trojan horse to spy on your non-WhatsApp photos and messages. Why would they do it? Facebook has been part of surveillance programs long before it acquired WhatsApp [4][5]. It is naive to think the company would change its policies after the acquisition...," Durov wrote on his official Telegram channel, Durov's Channel.

In his 446-word long post, the Telegram founder not only explained the logic behind Facebook's response to discovery of the vulnerability wherein videos corrupted videos were being used by hackers to gain access to users' smartphones but he also made a case for the vulnerability being exploited by the hackers.

While claiming that WhatsApp accidentally implemented "critical security vulnerabilities across all their apps every few months", the Durov said that despite being an app of similar complexity, Telegram had not witnessed issues of 'WhatsApp-level' severity in six years of its launch.