This week, a very serious security issue affected WhatsApp, as you know—if you're not familiar with it, check out this article explaining why you urgently need to update WhatsApp . The problem has been seized upon by Telegram 's founder , Pavel Durov , who saw it as the perfect opportunity to publicly explain why he believes the Facebook-owned platform will never be secure. We'll explain them all.
WhatsApp has never been and will never be secure, according to Pável Dúrov
Security on communication platforms like WhatsApp is undoubtedly a topic of debate that resurfaces periodically. It's usually a serious vulnerability that prompts us all to reconsider how secure these applications really are, and that's precisely what happened this week with the messaging service.
As you know, a major flaw allowed spyware to be installed simply by making a call through the service. The vulnerability has since been fixed with an update , but the issue has served as an excuse for people like Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram (who is known for his outspoken opinions on certain topics), to claim that WhatsApp will never be secure.
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This is how he explains it in an article published on his blog, where he points out that this week's security breach has not caught him by surprise, since it is not the first time that the app has suffered something like this. "Every time WhatsApp has to fix a critical vulnerability in its app, a new one pops up in its place."
According to Durov, all of WhatsApp's security problems function as backdoors , "holes" that no security specialist can verify because the platform is not open source— Telegram is, of course. "[...] not only does it not publish its code, but it does the exact opposite: it deliberately obfuscates its application binaries so that no one can thoroughly study them."
The founder of Telegram goes further and asserts that Facebook and its location within the "US environment" are largely to blame for WhatsApp's situation, forcing them to maintain these backdoors open for the FBI :
In 2016, three infiltration attempts were made by the FBI. Imagine what in 10 years that environment can cause having a company based in the United States.
Durov is aware that these "loopholes" are justified by the agencies as a means of fighting terrorism , but he criticizes that just as they are an open door for surveillance and preservation of the population's security, they are also an open door for criminals and authoritarian governments; that is why WhatsApp is allowed in countries like Russia, where Telegram is banned – Pavel Durov recalls in his writing that he had to leave his country precisely for that reason.
The executive also criticizes WhatsApp's supposedly secure conditions as nothing more than marketing . He asserts that the end-to-end encryption of messages loses all its effectiveness when backups are made in the cloud , where they lose that protection and are once again vulnerable to hackers or even the police. He further alleges that metadata generated by WhatsApp users (the records that describe who is talking to whom and when) is leaked in large volumes to all kinds of agencies by Facebook, whose advertising and deceptive strategies, according to the Telegram founder, are enormous and very powerful. The illustration below is precisely the one that heads Pavel Durov's article. Take a good look at the T-shirts, the trucks… It's quite something.
For all these reasons, he considers that updating to WhatsApp will not make the app more secure. In fact, Durov goes so far as to say that "there has not been a single day in WhatsApp's 10-year journey that this service was secure." Without cutting a hair.
If this article has made you reconsider some things, remember that we already gave you some tips for getting started on the Telegram platform . You can find them at the link below.
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