Chances are good that today you’ve sent a message through an end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging app such as WhatsApp, Signal, or iMessage. While we often take the privacy of these conversations for granted, they in fact rely on decades of research, testing, and standardization efforts, the foundation of which is a public-private key exchange.

Email makes modern communications work. We use email for keeping in touch with friends and family, organizing business activities, and tracking a variety of other needs. But how does email actually work and why do you get so many spam emails? That all comes down to email messaging protocols.

Cybercriminals are taking advantage of the messaging platform Telegram by creating channels and groups where learning and commerce all can take place freely. We’ve long known the dark web to be the back shadowed corner of the Internet where cybercriminals go to do business. But we’ve seen more examples of marketplaces frequented by threat actors shifting to the open web. One of the latest is the continued misuse of messaging platform Telegram.

Top tips is a weekly column where we highlight what’s trending in the tech world today and list out ways to explore these trends. This week, we’ll discuss a few hacks to keep your instant messaging secure. We all exchange texts everyday. It has easily become the most used mode of communication in the last decade. But, very few of us think about the security aspects of instant messaging. It’s time to change our mindsets.

People using messaging apps crave a dedicated space to conveniently chat, collaborate and organize with others. However, there are growing concerns about data privacy for at least 8 in 10 adult consumers worldwide. These are the people who have fallen prey to online scams due to privacy breaches. While some consumers would happily do a data trade-off on certain aspects of online safety for increased convenience, a vast majority would rather not.

Encryption means converting data (in the form of plain text) into a code that is unreadable by humans to prevent unauthorized access. There are many types of encryption, and they include encryption in transit, encryption at rest, and end-to-end encryption. Among them, end-to-end encryption is probably the best for communication services.

Secret-Chats in Telegram use end-to-end encryption, which is meant for people who are concerned about the security and privacy of their chat history. The messages can be read only by sender and receiver, and not even Telegram administrators have the encryption keys necessary to read any chats. From the Telegram FAQ.

CVE-2021-22116, CVE-2021-33175, and CVE-2021-33176 are denial of service vulnerabilities in three popular open source message broker applications.

Not long ago, we’d say “slack” to describe not working, as in “slacking on the job.” With the advent of the Slack app, though, the term has become synonymous with productivity. And Slack’s ability to work in tandem with hundreds of applications makes this popular team communication and collaboration tool even more useful.