Seeing this on Hacker News again, this time from Bloomberg, is so mind numbingly frustrating. I already contested this story when it first showed up on HN 14 ho

Seeing this on Hacker News again, this time from Bloomberg, is so mind numbingly frustrating. I already contested this story when it first showed up on HN 14 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16366754 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16366754. But time is a flat circle. Sigh. 1. This is not a vulnerability in Telegram. This is vulnerability in the way Windows processes malicious RLO characters in downloaded files. See: https://cdn.securelist.com/files/2018/02/180212-telegram-vulnerability-2.png https://cdn.securelist.com/files/2018/02/180212-telegram-vul.... The users must click past the security warning (unless they have manually disabled it in system settings), download the file to their machine, and run it. 2. This vulnerability is a phishing vector, not a "0-day" (which these days, is a marketing term). It allows you to send a user a file to compromise their machine, not the Telegram desktop application. Telegram is therefore the channel which can be used to execute a phishing attack. An email client would also be a channel. Kaspersky is trying to get eyeballs by checking off a bunch of boxes in the tech zeitgeist: Telegram, controversy over Telegram's security, cybercrime, cryptocurrencies and mining. They've baked a narrative that is specifically designed to market Kaspersky's services to its readers by dropping a bunch of keywords - the scenarios presented are so far removed from the standalone technicalities of the vulnerability that it's no longer even honest. Exploitive security marketing and the uninformed journalism that follows it around is going to give me an ulcer.