The founder of the Telegram messaging app, Pavel Durov, confirmed that his phone number is on the list of potential targets for Pegasus spyware from NSO Group. He disclosed this in his Telegram channel.
Durov said he was aware of his number in the database since 2018, but that did not trouble the Telegram founder. He noted that if hackers gained access to his phone, they would not find any important information, only “thousands of conceptual projects for Telegram features and millions of messages related to the development process”.
“Since 2011, when I was still living in Russia, I got used to assuming that all my phones are hacked,”
He also stressed that former NSA and CIA employee Edward Snowden already in 2013 described Apple and Google as participants in a “global surveillance system.”
“It implies that these companies should implement backdoors in their mobile operating systems. These backdoors, usually disguised as security flaws, allow US agencies to access information from any smartphone in the world”.
According to Durov, the problem is not only the access of American intelligence services to user data:
“If the US NSA can hack an iOS or Android phone, any other organisation that discovers these backdoors can do the same. No wonder that this is exactly what happened.”
The founder of Telegram described the existence of backdoors as a “huge problem for humanity” and urged action “against the Apple–Google duopoly in the smartphone market, to force them to open their closed ecosystems and create conditions for competition.”
Recall, in a joint media investigation found that Pegasus spyware was used to monitor human rights defenders, journalists and politicians around the world by hacking iPhone and Android devices.
According to available data, the list of potential targets includes more than 50,000 numbers. Among them found Pavel Durov’s phone number.
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