The Iranian Young Journalists Club (YJC) report that the popular messaging application Telegram has a security hole which has been exposed by Iranian white-hat hackers (ethical hackers). The vulnerability could cause smartphones to crash.
Telegram's security claims challenge anyone to try and undermine its security. Two Iranian hackers have discovered a security hole in Telegram, in which it is possible to send files much larger that the existing permitted limit (set at 4,096 bytes).
The Iranian hackers uploaded a video to prove their exploit. In the video, they say that there are two responses from a recipient's phone when Telegram messages larger than 4,096 bytes are sent. Firstly, the recipient's internet bandwidth is accordingly reduced in relation to the size of the message until it finishes and secondly, the receiving device runs out of memory and then the application crashes the smartphone.
The hackers stated that the sender does not need to be in your contacts so you may never know the true attacker if they are using an additional SIM card, for example.
Telegram is very popular with over 25 million users in Iran and its popularity is mainly due to many rival applications being subject to Iran's filtering restrictions.
Also, Iranians like Telegram because of the ability to create private or public "channels" and broadcast ideas through those.
However, can you really trust the encryption that Telegram uses, compared to applications like WhatsApp which use Signal standard end-to-end encryption? This article shows that maybe Iranians should think twice about using Telegram...
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