The mobile messaging app Telegram is popular in Iran, where citizens who have limited access to uncensored news and mainstream social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, use it to share and access information.
The following is an excerpt of this CPJ blog post published on 31 May 2016.
The mobile messaging app Telegram is popular in Iran, where citizens who have limited access to uncensored news and mainstream social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, use it to share and access information. But the app’s estimated 20 million users in Iran, including those who use Telegram to report and communicate with sources, could be putting themselves at severe risk of data compromise, security experts warn.
Created in 2013 by two Russian brothers, Telegram describes itself as a secure and private alternative to apps such as WhatsApp. But whereas WhatsApp applies end-to-end encryption to all traffic by default using the highly secure Signal encryption protocol, Telegram does neither. Security experts have expressed skepticism about the esoteric encryption Telegram uses, saying it is poorly designed and implemented.
Read the fully story on CPJ’s site here.
