Telegram the Trojan

It would have been difficult to have gone through the last couple of weeks and not have heard someone mention the recent Tucker Carlson interview of Telegram Messenger founder Pavel Durov.ⁱ

In their discussion Pavel makes an assortment of claims about Telegram, sugar-coating it as a free speech utopia sighting that it is a favourite platform for dissidents but he did not mention that it is also a favourite go to for drug dealersⁱⁱ, pedophilesⁱⁱⁱ, predators^iv and even ISIS^v.

Now we will go through these various claims of Durov:

Telegram is secure and cannot be penetrated

Pavel says Telegram is a superior app, which is totally impenetrable – yet in 2021 a team of security researchers and cryptographers identified various flaws in Telegrams encryption protocol^vi ranging from ‘technically trivial and easy to exploit to more advanced and of theoretical interest’. The protocol Telegram uses for its encryption is MTProto – considered by cryptographers as insecure.^vii This was not the only time Telegram has been flagged for having major flaws by industry experts see here^viii, here^ix, here^x, here^xi and here^xii

Also interesting is that 99% of the traffic that goes through Telegram is not encrypted. To encrypt messages it has to be enabled manually and is not a default setting, nor it is possible to use the encryption option in group chats. Telegram does not explain this to their users while at the same time bragging about how secure it is compared to the other messengers like Signal or Whatsapp which use conventional tried and tested encryption that is enabled by default.^xiii

All communications not encrypted are backed up on Telegrams servers (so 99% of them) permanently and Telegram operates on the basis of trust with users trusting them not to give away the data, which they have done multiple times, and their privacy policy now reads:

“If Telegram receives a court order that confirms you’re a terror suspect, we may disclose your IP address and phone number to the relevant authorities.”^xiv

For people living in an authoritarian regime like China or dealing with a corrupt government and they unfairly label a citizen a terror suspect Telegram will offer you no salvation, which has been the motivation for many of its users to begin using the app.

Not only does Telegram not keep your data secure and not tell users that encryption must be enabled manually leading to almost all users not using it and assuming to be safe; they collect detailed information on their users such as name, IP address, all contact information even of people not registered with Telegram, GPS coordinates and other metadata, creating a rich, vast database of nearly 1 Billion users.^xv

The Russian government is not connected to Telegram or involved in its operations

At the beginning of the interview Pavel stated the Russian State is not involved with Telegram whatsoever and such a claim is laughable. He did not mention though that Telegram received 1 Billion dollars in funding in 2021 from the Russian Sovereign Wealth Fund^xvi which is a State owned fund controlled by the central bank or that in 2023 he paired with Kremlin-connected VTB^xvii , Russia’s second largest bank and provided a payment system for citizens in Russia, although this transferred over to VK the social media app in 2024.

A company from Dubai heavily invested in Telegram: Mubadala has intimate ties with Russia. Mubadala is a state run company and they created a joint investment of 2 Billion US dollars with the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) into the Russian economy and was even mentioned in US Robert Mueller’s report on Russian election interference for its Kremlin connections.^xviii

Since 2023 the main Telegram.org server has been located in St Petersburg, Russia^xix where Nikolai Durov (Pavel’s brother) works at St Petersburg University as a Senior Researcher.^xx Nikolai does all of the core app programming and maintenance for Telegram, Pavel is generally a PR and sales guy in the grand scheme of things.^xxi

It is also publicly available that Telegram cooperates with Russian Law Enforcement ^xxii and in 2020 Vladimir Putin announced that he had made an agreement with Pavel Durov regarding Telegram and it was unblocked after a 2 year ban^xxiii

Due to the secrecy in Russia we can only really speculate about what that agreement entails we only know that Telegram allegedly agreed to cooperate with Russia’s ‘extremist investigations’, but personally I don’t think there was much negotiating going on based on Russia’s general way of dealing with political dissidents and opposition.

Pavel met regularly with Vladislav Surkov – Putin’s ex-advisor, politician and BBC documentary film maker Adam Curtis credits Surkov’s blend of theatre and politics with keeping Putin, and Putin’s chosen successors in power since 2000.^xxiv

Vladislav Surkov and Pavel Durov worked on ‘countering opposition’ movements in Russia together and Durov offered the solution of ‘following the Chinese model’ to block websites and create censorship.^xxv

Does it really seem laughable considering the above information that Telegram is being used as a tool by the Russian State to further its goals?

The FBI approached one of my employees at and tried to get him to build a backdoor in Telegram

This claim couldn’t be proven as it was word of mouth, but I would have thought the FBI have access to some of the most sophisticated, cutting edge hacking tools that exist and considering what experts on security have to say about Telegram’s lack of it, a backdoor seems unnecessary especially since the early 2000’s backdoors are being discovered in nearly everything at the hardware and software level so the amount of attack vectors the FBI could harness are countless and the lies already told in the interview by Pavel makes me not trust this claim even more.

One additional fact about Telegram that is fascinating is their Chief Investment Advisor is City of London investment banker John Hyman^xxvi who better to assist with a managing a criminal enterprise? He spent a number of years working for Kremlin connected Renaissance Capital owned by Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov also.

Conclusion

The former speaks for itself really, Pavel is not being truthful and it is not difficult to prove this. The question really is what is the intention for putting out this information. I am going to assume like Tuckers other material this is more propaganda to support Russia. It downplays the seriousness of being an enemy of Russia because Pavel is still here to tell the story unscathed. Russia would massively benefit having access to the databases Telegram keeps and I’m sure that the Durov brothers are powerless against the Russian regime despite what they say, but then truth telling isn’t exactly a strong point for Durov as we have learned.

If you know about the Perestroika Deception, Anatoli Golitsyn, Yuri Bezmenov, Aleksandr Dugin’s Eurasianism and Foundations of Geopolitics then all of this makes sense really, if you don’t then maybe it is time to stop watching Tucker Carlson =)

Act4YourFreedom.net

i Tucker Carlson interviews Pavel Durov Telegram founder:

iiTelegram: A Cybercriminal Hotspot: https://cybersixgill.com/news/articles/telegram-a-cybercriminal-hotspot-illicit-items-for-sale

iiiChild pornography widely shared on Telegram: https://nltimes.nl/2023/09/29/child-pornography-widely-shared-telegram-report

ivOn popular online platforms, predatory groups coerce children into self-harm: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2024/764-predator-discord-telegram/

vAutomating Terror: The Role and Impact of Telegram Bots in the Islamic State’s Online Ecosystem: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09546553.2023.2169141

viCryptographers unearth vunerabilities in Telegram’s encryption protocol: https://cyberscoop.com/telegram-app-security-encryption/

viiFleeing WhatsApp for Better Privacy? Don’t Turn to Telegram: https://www.wired.com/story/telegram-encryption-whatsapp-settings/

viiiHow Hackers are Getting Access to 1000’s of Telegram Accounts: https://medium.com/@giacaglia/how-hackers-are-getting-access-to-1000s-of-telegram-accounts-cf38c12b7ee1

ixHunting for bugs in Telegram’s animated stickers remote attack: https://www.shielder.com/blog/2021/02/hunting-for-bugs-in-telegrams-animated-stickers-remote-attack-surface/

xOn the CCA (in)security of MTProto: https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1177.pdf

xiA 264 Attack On Telegram, And Why a Super Villain Doesn’t Need It To Read Your Telegram Chats: https://web.archive.org/web/20150418082930/http://www.alexrad.me/discourse/a-264-attack-on-telegram-and-why-a-super-villain-doesnt-need-it-to-read-your-telegram-chats.html

xiiTelegram – “secret”? Yeah, right: https://usa.kaspersky.com/blog/telegram-why-nobody-uses-secret-chats/27662/

xiii6 Reasons Why You Might Want to Stop Using Telegram: https://www.makeuseof.com/reasons-stop-using-telegram/

xivTelegram Reportedly Handed User Data to German Authorities: https://www.cyberghostvpn.com/en_US/privacyhub/telegram-hands-data-to-authorities/

xvTelegram Privacy Policy: https://telegram.org/privacy?setln=uz

xviTelegram Raises $1Bln, With Russian Direct Investment Fund Buying Bonds: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/03/24/telegram-raises-1bln-with-russian-direct-investment-fund-buying-bonds-a73346

xviiVTB will launch a digital bank in Telegram: https://www.akm.ru/eng/news/vtb-will-launch-a-digital-bank-in-telegram/

xviii Mueller probe: Kirill Dmitriev’s ties to Putin and the UAE: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/4/6/mueller-probe-kirill-dmitrievs-ties-to-putin-and-the-uae

xixTelegram Main Server in Russia: https://whois-referral.toolforge.org/gateway.py?lookup=true&ip=95.161.64.10

xxNikolai Durov St Petersburg Department of Steklov Mathematical Institute of Russian Academy of Sciences: https://www.pdmi.ras.ru/pdmi/en/node/136

xxiWho Owns Telegram? https://www.fool.com/investing/how-to-invest/stocks/who-owns-telegram/

xxiiState Duma Deputy Says Telegram Cooperates with Russian Law Enforcers: https://www.ccn.com/news/technology/state-duma-telegram-cooperates-russian-law-enforcement/

xxiii Telegram operation in Russia settled, Putin notes: https://tass.com/politics/1308885

xxiv Vladislav Surkov: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladislav_Surkov#cite_note-:6-13

xxvVkontakte Manipulated Web Content to Counter Opposition, Report Says: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/archive/vkontakte-manipulated-web-content-to-counter-opposition-report-says

xxvi John Hyman. Who is the Telegram Chief Investment Advisor?: https://coinstelegram.com/smart-money/john-hyman-who-is-the-telegram-chief-investment-adviser/