The FINANCIAL — Ukraine’s National Coordination Center for Cybersecurity on September 20 banned the use of the Telegram messenger app for state officials, military personnel, and employees of key infrastructure, citing security issues.
The center quoted intelligence chief Kirill Budanov as saying that there was “grounded information” about Russian intelligence’s ability to access correspondence by Telegram users and their personal data.
Those who use Telegram as “part of their job duties” will not be affected by the move. Last month, Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov, a native of Russia, was detained in Paris and later released on bail for alleged “complicity in the administration of an online platform to allow an illicit transaction, in an organized gang.”
The fact that Telegram holds the decryption key on its server technically means that Telegram could decrypt and read the encrypted content. This poses some risk because if someone breaches Telegram’s servers, your messages and personal information may get into the hands of cybercriminals.
If Telegram is installed on your phone, then there are security and privacy risks you need to understand. But a new report has just warned of an even more dangerous threat to your phone from the messaging app, and one that is getting worse, Forbes expert announced.
As Kaspersky warned last year, “Telegram’s developers position their product as safe and protected. But in practice that’s not entirely true. The reality is that Telegram has a number of quirks that make protecting your messages a little tricky… some rather dubious features in both the messenger’s interface and general logic make it less secure than is commonly believed.”
Meanwhile the municipality of Amsterdam has banned its civil servants from using the messaging app Telegram on their work phones due to concerns over criminal activity and potential espionage, local media reported on Monday.
The ban, which was implemented at the end of April but only recently made public, is attributed to fears that Telegram could be a “safe haven for hackers, cybercriminals, and drug dealers,” according to a spokesperson for the municipality, as reported by NL Times and broadcaster BNR.
While no other Dutch municipalities have yet banned Telegram, the Dutch intelligence service AIVD had previously raised concerns about espionage threats from apps originating in countries with “offensive cyber programs.” The service had also flagged apps such as the Russian VKontakte and the Chinese shopping apps Temu and AliExpress as being particularly risky.
Telegram, which boasts nearly a billion users globally and approximately 2 million users in the Netherlands, is now the largest app to be banned by a Dutch authority since the government prohibited TikTok on civil servants’ phones last year.
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