It was announced this week that messaging apps have now overtaken text messages by the volume of messages exchanged each day. This isn’t breaking news - in 2012, close to 19 billion messages were sent per day through chat applications (such as Whatsapp, Line, Viber, etc) while only around 17 billion were sent through text messages. While a lot of attention focuses on the steep decline in the revenue of telecom providers, what consumers should be interested in here is security. As the trend toward messaging apps continues, we need to ask ourselves if we can trust these services to project our data. How secure are chat apps? How much data could be leaked or hacked from a breached chat app? Are they more or less safe than traditional text messages?

According to research commissioned by the UK Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), around 87% of small firms experienced security breaches last year. Because of these ongoing and persistent security breaches, companies are spending more and more on security to keep their businesses up and running - the same report estimated that UK companies spend up to 6% of their annual turnover on protecting their security.