Stay Away From WhatsApp: Telegram Founder

Telegram founder Pavel Durov on Thursday said that users should stay away from messaging platform WhatsApp. He said hackers could have “full access” to everything on the phones of WhatsApp users.

The tech leader flagged the vulnerabilities revealed by WhatsApp in September to be extremely dangerous. 

“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”, said Durov in his Telegram post.

In September, WhatsApp had disclosed two vulnerabilities in the app CVE-2022-36934 and CVE-2022-27492. 

Durov said that such vulnerabilities are hard to tap down through patches issued through updates.

“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”, he added.

Telegram executive feels such issues are hardly incidental. He opines that they are planted backdoors. “If one backdoor is discovered and has to be removed, another one is added”, Durov said. 

Duorv’s Telegram messaging platfrom is one of WhatsApp’s biggest rivals. It has over 700 million active users and 2 million plus daily signups.

“It doesn't matter if you are the richest person on earth – if you have WhatsApp installed on your phone, all your data from every app on your device is accessible, as Jeff Bezos found out in 2020. That's why I deleted WhatsApp from my devices years ago”, he warned.