indica News Bureau-
The founder of Telegram, the messenger app, Parel Durov, in a post on the platform, has urged
people to delete WhatsApp unless they are “okay with surveillance,” according to news media reports.
Facebook-owned WhatsApp, which has been mired by a snooping row, is used as a Trojan horse to spy on the users’ non-WhatsApp content, including images stored on their smartphones, according to Durov.
“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, Forbes reported
on Thursday.
WhatsApp has a global user base of 1.6 billion while Telegram has 200 million users globally.
Telegram, perhaps because of its size, is not subject to the same hacks and security breaches as WhatsApp. So it is no surprise, observers say, that Durov would use the recent backdoor discoveries in WhatsApp as a means to go after his commercial and, in many ways, ideological rival, the report added.
Earlier this week, WhatsApp urged users to update to the latest version after a second security flaw was discovered.
The latest WhatsApp security vulnerability gives hackers a cyber-attack vector. If someone has sent a user an MP4 file on WhatsApp, users should guard against downloading it as hackers may use a critical vulnerability in the Facebook-owned app to execute snooping attacks on both Android and iOS devices.
“The vulnerability is classified as ‘Critical’ severity that affected an unknown code block of the component MP4 File Handler in WhatsApp,” reported gbhackers.com.
Facebook had issued an advisory, saying “A stack-based buffer overflow could be triggered in WhatsApp by sending a specially crafted MP4 file to a WhatsApp user.”
