The government of Pakistan has officially restricted the use of Viber by its officials under the suspicion of the mobile application being used for spying by the Israeli Defense Forces. A memo was circulated in all the ministries and divisions by the National Telecom and Information Technology Security Board functioning under the Cabinet, instructing the officials to not use Viber under security concerns.
According to the memo, Viber was founded by four Israeli partners Talmon Marco, Igor Megzinik, Sani Maroli and Samocha with Talmon Marco as its CEO. It was officially launched in 2nd December, 2010 in competition with Skype. Now it has become the most downloaded mobile application. It has over 100 million monthly active users from its 280 million users. Viber media was acquired by a Japanese e-commerce company, Rakutan. The founders of Viber belong to the Israeli Defense forces. It is controlled from Israel and its funding was done by the friends and family of Marco. This statement raised suspicion, as a huge investment of $20million for the company was not just justified.
The government of Pakistan has informed that a copy of the phones address book and call detail records are stored on the Viber server. The location information is stored on the Viber server. Viber can disclose or share its user’s information to comply with their trusted law enforcement agencies. Viber can read the phone status and identity, read your text messages, record audio, approximated location network based, precise location GPS and network based, read call logs, read contacts, read our social stream, modify or delete the contents of your usb storage, find account on device, read Google service configuration, use account on the device, network connectivity, has full network access, view wifi connections, retrieve running applications, read sync settings, modify system settings and test access to protected storage.
According to the government documents, the investors of Viber are not known which may confirm the fact that it is a state owned application which is capable of monitoring every activity of a user. It also uses various unauthorized techniques including cookies, clear GIFs and other automatic data collection techniques to spy and track users.
Users who are ignorant of such tactics may save sensitive and personal information about their friends such as, maj Ali, Sec xxx, ISI military, Navy or Air Force Unit. Viber will instantly identify this person as a security concern. It is best to not use Viber on mobiles with sensitive information or to keep a separate mobile for this purpose.
