Telegram Chief Reveals Major Security ‘Red Flag’ Questions For Experts: What We Know

Telegram has made strong claims over the years about its security standards and how your messages are safe on the platform. But recent details spilled by Telegram Chief Pavel Durov has raised serious red flags about the platform and how it is handling such a high traffic of messages.

In an interview this month, Durov was candid about how Telegram is being run with a skeletal team of engineers and his role at the company. Durov was quoted saying that he is the only product manager at Telegram and also that he only has 30 engineers employed to run the platforms at such a scale.

The company reacted to these figures and commented on this report by TechCrunch, clarifying that it has another 30 developers who are part of the core team. The worrying part of Telegram’s admission is that we still don’t know who comprises as a part of this core team, and whether it even has a chief security officer to oversee the major functioning of the messaging platform.

Messaging App That Does More

Experts quoted in the report talk about the concerns of the platform, which is no longer just a messaging app. After all, Telegram now lets you share large size files, where we have seen movie downloads happening through these groups. It is essentially a social media app, which houses data of its claimed 1 billion user base.

So, having just 60 engineers without really defining their roles publicly is a major hazard. That’s not all, Telegram is known to be less secure by default because the end-to-end encryption won’t work till you enable the feature, unlike WhatsApp and Signal where the standards are working from day one.

We have heard experts talk about Telegram’s security issues, and these revelations from Durov tend to work against the platform further, as more people might feel inclined to use the alternative apps, especially if they are really worried for their data and security.