OREANDA-NEWS. The creator of the Telegram messenger, Pavel Durov, criticized the WhatsApp application for security vulnerabilities that allow Western intelligence agencies to access personal user data. He expressed this opinion in an article published on Wednesday on the platform for keeping the Telegraph online diaries.

“Every time WhatsApp has to fix a critical vulnerability in its application, a new one appears in its place,” Durov wrote. According to him, "it is not easy to launch an application for secure communications from the United States". “For the week spent by our team in the USA in 2016, there were three hacking attempts by the FBI,” he noted. “Imagine how 10 years can be hurt in this environment.” "All their security problems are good for surveillance and look and work as backdoors", Durov is sure.

Backdoors - hidden remote administration programs. Such a defect in the algorithm is intentionally embedded by the developer and allows unauthorized access to the data. "Unlike the Telegram, WhatsApp does not publish the source code, so security specialists cannot easily verify if there are backdoors in its code," said Durov. At the same time, he suggested that the “backdoors” could have been installed at the direction of the special services themselves, this would be a reasonable decision with their side.

“WhatsApp intentionally confuses the files of its applications so that no one can thoroughly examine them. WhatsApp and its parent company Facebook may have even demanded to install backdoors,” he suggested, noting that such an indication could come from the FBI. On May 13, the Financial Times newspaper reported that unknown attackers installed spyware on mobile phones using the WhatsApp call feature. Devices on iOS and Android platforms were vulnerable to attack.