Telegram CEO Pavel Durov has said that an individual has to be “braindead to believe WhatsApp is secure”. The Russian billionaire’s comments come amid a class-action lawsuit against Meta-owned WhatsApp in San Francisco, accusing it of accessing users’ messages, contradicting end-to-end encryption (E2EE) promises. “You’d have to be braindead to believe WhatsApp is secure in 2026. When we analyzed how WhatsApp implemented its “encryption”, we found multiple attack vectors,” Pavel Durov wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter). In the post, Durov cited Telegram’s internal analysis revealing unspecified “attack vectors” in WhatsApp’s encryption implementation, though no public details have emerged, while WhatsApp’s Signal Protocol has undergone independent audits confirming default E2EE.
Elon Musk criticizes Meta’s WhatsApp
Telegram CEO was joined by Elon Musk in criticizing the instant messaing app. The Tesla CEO shared a post on X writing “WhatsApp is not secure. Even Signal is questionable. Use X Chat.” Musk was responding to a post by DogeDesigner that quoted Bloomberg report about the lawsuit against Meta.
Lawsuit filed against WhatsApp
As reported by Bloomberg, an international group of plaintiffs has filed a lawsuit in the US District Court for Northern California. It challenges Meta’s marketing of E2EE feature, a security standard which the company claims protects the messages on the app and ensures only the sender and recipient can read a message.The lawsuit claims that Meta’s privacy claims are false as the company WhatsApp “store, analyze, and can access virtually all of WhatsApp users’ purportedly ‘private’ communications”. The plaintiffs represented users from India, Brazil, Australia, Mexico and South Africa. It also alleges that the company retains the ability to decrypt and review the substance of messages for data analysis and internal monitoring.
What Meta said
Calling the allegations “frivolous” and “absurd,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone confirmed that Meta will seek legal sanctions against the plaintiffs’ counsel for bringing the case forward.“Any claim that people’s WhatsApp messages are not encrypted is categorically false. WhatsApp has been end-to-end encrypted using the Signal protocol for a decade. This lawsuit is a frivolous work of fiction,” Stone said in an emailed statement to Bloomberg.
