The founder of Telegram has urged people to use “any messaging app” except WhatsApp to avoid their phone being hacked.
Pavel Durov cited a security issue disclosed by WhatsApp last week that allowed a hacker to hijack a person’s phone by sending a malicious video to their number.
“Hackers could have full access (!) to everything on the phones of WhatsApp users,” he claimed on Telegram.
"Every year we learn about some issue in WhatsApp that puts everything on their users’ devices at risk".
"If you have WhatsApp installed on your phone, all your data from every app on your device is accessible".
The Russian tech billionaire, claimed that the security flaws are “planted backdoors” to allow hackers to bypass the encryption and other security measures.
Mr Durov has previously claimed that “WhatsApp will never be secure” unless there are fundamental changes made to how it works.
Telegram, which is known for taking a privacy-first approach to its app, has more than 700 million active users.
“I’m not pushing people to switch to Telegram here... Telegram doesn’t need additional promotion,” Mr Durov wrote.