Hackers Could Have Full Access to Everything on Phones of WhatsApp Users

Yesterday, Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, said that "hackers could have full access (!) to everything on the phones of WhatsApp users" and this was possible through a security issue disclosed by WhatsApp itself last week.

Durov warned that even though some users regularly update their version of the app, WhatsApp has regularly had security problems. This time, all a hacker had to do to control the phone was to send user a malicious video or start a video call on WhatsApp. A WhatsApp security issue exactly like this one was discovered in 2017 and 2018, then another in 2019 and yet another one in 2020, while prior to 2016, WhatsApp didn't have encryption at all.

The founder of Telegram believes that WhatsApp will never be secure:

Every year, we learn about some issue in WhatsApp that puts everything on their users' devices at risk. Which means it's almost certain that a new security flaw already exists there. Such issues are hardly incidental – they are planted backdoors. If one backdoor is discovered and has to be removed, another one is added.

In 2020 Jeff Bezos found that all data from every app on his device was accessible, because of WhatsApp security flaws. This is one of the examples of how WhatsApp creates a doot to user's phone. Durov said this is the reason why he had deleted WhatsApp from his devices "years ago."

At the end of his post, Durov made a disclaimer that he was not pushing people to install Telegram instead but was rather warning the readers not to use WhatsApp.

I'm not pushing people to switch to Telegram here. With 700M+ active users and 2M+ daily signups, Telegram doesn't need additional promotion. You can use any messaging app you like, but do stay away from WhatsApp – it has now been a surveillance tool for 14 years.