Telegram Gained 3 Million New Users During WhatsApp, Facebook Outage

Mar 14, 2019

WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram faced a widespread outage
yesterday with users from around the world reporting issues with
sending messages on WhatsApp and Messenger, posting feeds on
Facebook and accessing other features on the three Facebook-owned
platforms.

While the outage was quite troubling both for the social media
giant and its millions of users, guess who benefits the most out of
the incident?

TELEGRAM.

Pavel Durov, the founder of the popular secure messaging
platform Telegram, claims to have had a surge in sign-ups within
the last 24 hours, at the time duration when its rival messaging
services were facing downtime.

“I see 3 million new users signed up for Telegram within the last
24 hours,” Durov wrote ^[1] on his Telegram channel.
“Good. We have true privacy and unlimited space for everyone.”

Telegram is an excellent alternative to Facebook’s Messenger and
WhatsApp services, offering users an optional end-to-end encrypted
messaging feature, so that no one, not even Telegram, can access
them.

Telegram adopted end-to-end encryption support way back in
2013—three years before WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

Besides this, Telegram messenger has introduced many unique
features in recent months that no other widely-adopted messaging
app is yet offering. Two of these features include:

Multiple Account Support: Users can add up to 3 Telegram
accounts and easily switch between them simultaneously without
logging out.
Create Polls: Telegram offers built-in polling feature
for large communities, allowing them to coordinate their activities
and discuss complex issues efficiently.

The telegram has previously faced restrictions and bans in countries
like Iran ^[2], as well as in its home
country Russia, after Durov refused to
comply ^[3] with government requests
for encryption keys and information on its users.

“In 5+ years, Telegram disclosed exactly zero bytes of private
data to third-parties including governments. That’s why Telegram is
banned by authoritarian governments such as Russia and Iran. Other
apps such as WhatsApp have no issues with there,” Durov said in a
tweet.

Since Durov telegram message doesn’t offer any explanation for
the sudden spike in the Telegram sign-ups, The Hacker News has
reached out to him and will update this article as soon as we hear
back.

References

^{^}
wrote (t.me)
^{^}
bans in countries like Iran
(thehackernews.com)
^{^}
Durov refused to comply
(thehackernews.com)

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OWASP TOP !0

Injection. Injection flaws, such as SQL, NoSQL, OS, and LDAP injection, occur when untrusted data is sent to an interpreter as part of a command or query. The attacker’s hostile data can trick the interpreter into executing unintended commands or accessing data without proper authorization. Broken Authentication. Application functions related to authentication and session management are often implemented incorrectly, allowing attackers to compromise passwords, keys, or session tokens, or to exploit other implementation flaws to assume other users’ identities temporarily or permanently. Sensitive Data Exposure. Many web applications and APIs do not properly protect sensitive data, such as financial, healthcare, and PII. Attackers may steal or modify such weakly protected data to conduct credit card fraud, identity theft, or other crimes. Sensitive data may be compromised without extra protection, such as encryption at rest or in transit, and requires special precautions when exchanged with the browser. XML External Entities (XXE). Many older or poorly configured XML processors evaluate external entity references within XML documents. External entities can be used to disclose internal files using the file URI handler, internal file shares, internal port scanning, remote code execution, and denial of service attacks. Broken Access Control. Restrictions on what authenticated users are allowed to do are often not properly enforced. Attackers can exploit these flaws to access unauthorized functionality and/or data, such as access other users’ accounts, view sensitive files, modify other users’ data, change access rights, etc. Security Misconfiguration. Security misconfiguration is the most commonly seen issue. This is commonly a result of insecure default configurations, incomplete or ad hoc configurations, open cloud storage, misconfigured HTTP headers, and verbose error messages containing sensitive information. Not only must all operating systems, frameworks, libraries, and applications be securely configured, but they must be patched/upgraded in a timely fashion. Cross-Site Scripting XSS. XSS flaws occur whenever an application includes untrusted data in a new web page without proper validation or escaping, or updates an existing web page with user-supplied data using a browser API that can create HTML or JavaScript. XSS allows attackers to execute scripts in the victim’s browser which can hijack user sessions, deface web sites, or redirect the user to malicious sites. Insecure Deserialization. Insecure deserialization often leads to remote code execution. Even if deserialization flaws do not result in remote code execution, they can be used to perform attacks, including replay attacks, injection attacks, and privilege escalation attacks. Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities. Components, such as libraries, frameworks, and other software modules, run with the same privileges as the application. If a vulnerable component is exploited, such an attack can facilitate serious data loss or server takeover. Applications and APIs using components with known vulnerabilities may undermine application defenses and enable various attacks and impacts. Insufficient Logging & Monitoring. Insufficient logging and monitoring, coupled with missing or ineffective integration with incident response, allows attackers to further attack systems, maintain persistence, pivot to more systems, and tamper, extract, or destroy data. Most breach studies show time to detect a breach is over 200 days, typically detected by external parties rather than internal processes or monitoring.

Telegram Gained 3 Million New Users During WhatsApp, Facebook Outage

References

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