Tag Archive for: Telegram

Why Telegram Is Now ‘Dangerous’ For Millions Of You

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A stark new warning today, with millions of you exposed as a malicious new threat exploits Telegram to target you with dangerous malware—even if you’re not a user. If you’re hit by this cyber attack, you risk data theft, spyware, ransomware and even a complete system takeover. Here’s how to check if you’re infected.

Last year, Telegram’s Pavel Durov, warned that “using WhatsApp is dangerous.” But now that provocative attack has come back to bite. A new security report, issued today, warns of “a growing cyber threat where hackers use Telegram, the instant messaging app with over 500 million active users, as a command and control system.”

Durov’s WhatsApp warning focused on hacks to the Facebook-owned messenger itself, where, he said, backdoors had been planted to extract user data. He also cautioned WhatsApp users over the lack of end-to-end encrypted backups. These were very targeted, very specific attacks, perpetrated by sophisticated threat actors.

On a wider scale, the use of messengers to spread malware is not new. Earlier this month, Check Point warned that a rogue Netflix security-bypass app on Google’s Play Store was abusing Android’s “Notification Listening Service” to intercept incoming WhatsApp messages on victims’ phones, and then automatically reply to those messages with dangerous, malware-laced attachments and links.

Clearly, Telegram has that same risk—any messenger can be exploited to send dangerous messages, attachments and links, and you should always be wary of links and attachments, even if they appear to come from friends. But there are much more serious dangers with Telegram that can’t be mitigated by a user’s common sense alone.

Telegram is significantly more complex than its direct rivals, the likes of Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, iMessage and Signal. Its architecture now serves more than 500 million users, through a spider’s web of connected endpoints and its own cloud back-end. It provides seemingly…

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Telegram or Signal? Welcome to the illusion called data security

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By Nishant Arora

As millions shun WhatsApp and download new chat platforms in search for a secure experience, mind you that security is nothing but an illusion and there is no guarantee that Telegram or Signal may not be hacked in the future, especially when nation-state actors with highly sophisticated tools and huge resources are on the prowl.

Encryption is fundamentally flawed and once hackers get to know any vulnerability or bug in the whole data travel journey — apps, mobile operating system, public Wi-Fi, Cloud and the physical data centres — your personal and sensitive information is always at their mercy.

The Telegram development team is based in Dubai. The Telegram team had to leave Russia due to local IT regulations and has tried a number of locations as its base, including Berlin, London and Singapore. It does not store data within the boundaries of India.

Signal does not own its own data centres. The company is entirely Cloud based, which puts data at risk as cyber-attacks on Cloud-based services have increased in the recent past.

In case the data is compromised, India which does not have a dedicated law on privacy or on cyber security, will not be able to do much, unlike Europe which has a strong General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that treats the safety of its users’ data diligently and seriously.

According to Pavan Duggal, one of the nation’s top cyber law experts and a seasoned Supreme Court lawyer, if you are looking at complete and absolute security, you have to realise that security is a relative term.

“What was secure yesterday is not secure today and what is secure today will not be secure tomorrow. Blindfoldly relying upon these platforms would not suffice. There is a need for people to incorporate cyber security as a way of life,” Duggal told IANS.

Be it Pegasus software attack on WhatsApp or the great Twitter crypto hacking last year that compromised accounts of celebrities like US President-elect Joe Biden, former US President Barack Obama, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (you name it), people are always facing the risk of losing their data.

The latest is the SolarWinds attack that…

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Meet The Billionaires Behind Signal And Telegram, Two New Online Homes For Angry Conservatives

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In 2018, Brian Acton, the billionaire WhatsApp cofounder, committed several fateful actions. He had quit Facebook a few months earlier, and in March, he took his rift with the company public by firing off an angry tweet—“It is time. #deleteFacebook”—just as the company that had bought his app descended into scandal over its data-sharing practices and status as a hotbed for conservative misinformation. Nearly at the same time, Acton was funneling $50 million into a new non-profit, the Signal Foundation, naming himself its executive chairman. The group’s overriding goal: finance a three-year-old app called Signal, which allowed users to send end-to-end encrypted messages.

Signal offered easy communication and secure, total anonymity. With the new funding, it wouldn’t need to cave to commercial interests and sell ads, something Acton hated about Facebook. Grandly, he envisioned Signal making “private communication accessible and ubiquitous,” he told Forbes in 2018, and the app has largely lived up to his expectations. It is especially valued among journalists and activists like the ones who planned the Black Lives Matter protests. But in an ironic twist, the app is poised to become a new digital haven for conservatives—just as Facebook before it. These right-wing users are drawn to it for the same reasons BLM organizers liked it: It offers the ability to plan and communicate en masse without worrying about the app exerting content-moderation policies or aiding authorities pursuing charges against them. Signal doesn’t appear to have any such policies and doesn’t have access to users’ messages, theoretically making it impossible to cooperate with a police investigation.

“The use of Signal and Telegram is really dangerous. They appear to be at this moment welcoming hateful users who’ve been kicked off other platforms or been made to feel unwelcome on other platforms,” says Harry Fernandez, a director at Change the Terms, a…

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