There is also the risk of Russian special services intercepting classified information. According to Ukrinform’s report, Vitaliy Yakushev, the director of the cybersecurity company, told Ukrainian Radio about this.

He recommended that public messengers not be used to convey information with limited access.

“Public journalists in the country where they are registered must cooperate with the special services of that country. It is an axiom. You can’t have an ambassador who won’t disseminate some information. Someone does the correspondence, someone gives metadata. So we have to do it too. understand that a messenger in the US – Signal, WhatsApp, Facebook messenger – they share the information with American intelligence services. If it is Viber registered in Japan, then it is shared with Japanese intelligence services. in these countries, for example, in Russia, and the servers are not known to be located on the territory of another country. Are you sure whether they share information from these servers? Therefore, I would not use absolutely all public messaging programs to transmit confidential information that could harm the country or people’s life or health. No public messaging program is not designed for this. To have some fun, get information or just chat – choose any messaging app you want. If we talk about the use of messengers in both frontline and hidden positions, sometimes messengers are given access to geolocations. So who will have access to geolocation? The worst option is the enemy. Therefore, it is necessary to use private messengers, not public. We set them up to convey information even about our customers. Even for this type of information, we do not use public messengers, we use our own private messengers,” said the expert.

Yakushev specifically described TikTok and WeChat as “spies in your pocket.”

As Ukrinform reported, Due to the threat of espionage in the Netherlands, authorities were banned from installing the AliExpress app, the Wechat chat app, the CapCut video editing program and the Russian social network Vkontakte on their phones.