WhatsApp Becomes a Field for Hackers, Telegram CEO Asks Users to Stay Away from WhatsApp

WhatsApp continues to be monitored for 15 years (photo: Unsplash)

JAKARTA - In today's digital era, one of the most important aspects that everyone should pay attention to is privacy security, especially for application developers. Moreover, security issues continue to approach WhatsApp users around the world.

This was revealed by the founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov in a post uploaded on Thursday, October 6. Durov said that hackers can have full access to everything on a WhatsApp user's phone by sending a malicious video or starting a video call with you on WhatsApp.

"This exact WhatsApp security issue was discovered in 2018, then another in 2019 and another in 2020," Durov wrote.

2018

In 2018, the messenger service WhatsApp confirmed that there was a bug on its platform that allowed hackers to take over users' apps when they answered an incoming video call.

2019

A similar incident occurred again in 2019, where a vulnerability in WhatsApp had allowed attackers to inject Israeli commercial spyware into phones. WhatsApp discovered in early May that attackers could install surveillance software onto iPhones and Android phones by calling targets using the app's phone call function.

2020

Later in 2020, according to a report from the Times of India, this Meta-owned messaging app has revealed six vulnerabilities in the app that allow attackers to push malicious code remotely via images, URLs and video calls.

Although at the time WhatsApp claimed that the vulnerability had been fixed, there was no official information whether users were affected or not.

"Every year, we learn of several issues in WhatsApp that put everything on the user's device at risk," Durov continued.

He continued, almost all of the loopholes in WhatsApp's security problems were already there and happened by accident.

"They are planted in the backdoor. If one backdoor is found and must be removed, another is added," he said.

According to him, there is no problem if you install WhatsApp on your phone, but the thing to note is that all data of every app on your device can be accessed by hackers.

"I'm not encouraging people to switch to Telegram here. You can use any messaging app you like, but stay away from WhatsApp because it has now been a surveillance tool for 13 years," he said.