WhatsApp users are flocking to Telegram

Hamster

Hamster

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I feel like I've been here before:
  • A couple of nobodies are butt hurt and in denial about BBM WhatsApp dying a slow death
  • Everybody is jumping onto WhatsApp Telegram
  • A couple of frontiersmen punt Telegram Signal but nobody cares because nobody is using it
 
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Corelli

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gregmcc said:
Easily hacked? Are you guessing or do you have proof?
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Cryptography contests[edit]​

Telegram has organized two cryptography contests to challenge its own security. Third parties were asked to break the service's cryptography and disclose the information contained within a secret chat between two computer-controlled users. A reward of respectively US$200,000 and US$300,000 was offered. Both of these contests expired with no winners.[269][270] Security researcher Moxie Marlinspike and commenters on Hacker News criticized the first contest for being rigged or framed in Telegram's favor and said that Telegram's statements on the value of these contests as proof of the cryptography's quality are misleading. This was because the cryptography contest could not be won even with completely broken algorithms such as MD2 (hash function) used as key stream extractor, and primitives such as the Dual_EC_DRBG that is known to be backdoored.[271][272][273]

2019 Puerto Rico "Telegramgate"[edit]​

Main article: Telegramgate
Telegram was the main subject surrounding the 2019 Puerto Rico riots that ended up in the resignation of then Governor Ricardo Rosselló after a Telegram chat leaked with of hundreds of pages of a group chat on the messaging application Telegram between Rosselló and members of his staff from his term. The messages were considered vulgar, racist, and homophobic toward several individuals and groups, and discussed how they would use the media to target potential political opponents.

Data selling bot[edit]​

The chairman of the public organization "Electronic Democracy" Volodymyr Flents on 11 May 2020 announced that a Telegram bot appeared on the Web, which sold personal data of citizens of Ukraine. It is estimated that the bot contains data from 26 million Ukrainians registered in the Dіia application. However, subsequently, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation Mikhail Fedorov denied fakes about the sale of data from "Dіia". The criminal activity of 25 people has already been confirmed and copies of 30 databases were seized.[274][275][276]



Security breaches[edit]​

In 2013, an author on Russian programming website Habr discovered an unexplained modification to the Diffie-Hellman key exchange scheme as described in the first version of MTProto specification that would allow an attacker to mount a man-in-the-middle attack and prevent the victim from being alerted by changed key fingerprint. The bug was fixed by the company shortly after the initial publication without any explanation.[206]

On 2 August 2016, a report by Reuters stated Iranian hackers compromised more than a dozen Telegram accounts and identified the phone numbers of 15 million Iranian users, as well as the associated user IDs. Researches said the hackers belonged to a group known as Rocket Kitten. Rocket Kitten's attacks were similar to ones attributed to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. The attackers took advantage of a programming interface built into Telegram. According to Telegram, these mass checks are no longer possible because of limitations introduced into its API earlier in 2016.[207]

On 30 March 2020, an Elasticsearch database holding 42 million records containing user IDs and phone numbers was exposed online without a password. The accounts listed in the database were those belonging to users in Iran, extracted from an unofficial government-sanctioned version of Telegram. It took 11 days for the database to be taken down, but the researchers say the data was accessed by other parties, including a hacker who reported the information to a specialized forum.[208][209][210]

In September 2020, it was reported there have been successful large-scale Iranian government phishing and surveillance by RampantKitten targeting dissidents in Telegram.[211] The attack relied on people downloading a malware-infected file from any source, at which point it would replace Telegram files on the device and 'clone' session data. David Wolpoff, a former Department of Defense contractor, has stated that the weak link in the attack was the device itself and not any of the affected apps: "There’s no way for a secure communication app to keep a user safe when the end devices are compromised."[212]


Really you dont have to be a brightspark, and these are only whats communicated.
 
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Corelli

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Oh and in many countries of the world telegram has now agreed to provide the governments with your chat records to fight well anything that you shouldnt be saying.....
 
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neoprema

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Nemoneiros said:
But they still use Facebook
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This argument doesn't apply.
I use facebook to post a picture of the sea on holiday.

When I chat about something private to someone I want it on a platform not collecting information.
 
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Corelli

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Hamster said:
Tell me something: do you honestly think somebody is going to read all of that?
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Nope its the scene when you ask what case you have and you walk with a warehouse full of boxes and dump it saying well....youre toast.
 
Fulcrum29

Fulcrum29

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My Telegram contacts list have now grown exponentially, and though I haven't had a thorough check most are still on WhatsApp.

My Signal contacts list have grown by 16 new users...

Most community groups have moved to Telegram, and WhatsApp is quite the topic on Telegram.
 
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