Telegram has rejected suggestions that its server infrastructure may be linked to Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB). The company's representative, Remi Vaughn, told TechRadar this.
“All Telegram servers are owned by Telegram and maintained by Telegram employees. Unauthorized access to any data is impossible,” Vaughn said. According to him, the company has contracts with dozens of providers worldwide, but none of them has access to Telegram's data or sensitive infrastructure. He also claimed that throughout its history the company has never handed over private messages to third parties and its encryption has never been breached.
The IStories investigation, supported by OCCRP, alleges that more than 10,000 IP addresses in Telegram's technical infrastructure are managed by Global Network Management (GNM), a company registered in Antigua and Barbuda. According to Florida court documents reviewed by the journalists, the company's owner is named as Russian network engineer Vladimir Vedeneyev. According to the investigation, he stated in court that he had power of attorney to sign documents on behalf of Pavel Durov and on behalf of Telegram, and that he participated in the installation of the messenger and its subsequent technical support.
Furthermore, according to IStories, Telegram uses 5,000 IP addresses provided by the St. Petersburg company Electrontelecom, which the investigators link to FSB contractors. Vedeneyev is also named as the founder of GlobalNet, a major Russian backbone operator that, according to IStories, controlled Telegram's IP addresses until 2020. Among GlobalNet's clients, the publication names the Main Research Computing Center of the Administrative Directorate of the President of Russia (GlavNIVTs), which officially provides technical support for Vladimir Putin's public events, including the “direct lines” and summits. In 2022, according to the investigation, GlobalNet launched the first traffic filtering and monitoring systems based on Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) at the request of Roskomnadzor.
A Telegram representative called these accusations baseless. In turn, IStories journalists stated that the company's response “contradicts the facts established in an American court.”
Security specialist Michał “Rysiek” Woźniak, who previously headed infrastructure and information security at OCCRP, warned in a conversation with IStories that even if message content is inaccessible, the system could still allow users to be tracked. “If I know your device's ‘auth_key_id’ and can monitor the network over which the data is transmitted… I know that it is your device communicating with Telegram's servers. By examining network packets… I also get your IP address at a given moment in time, which indicates your approximate geographic location,” he said. According to him, this would become a real problem if Russian special services actually gained access to Telegram's traffic, turning it into “a tool for global surveillance of messenger users, regardless of where they are located and which server they connect to.”
Telegram, launched in 2013, remains one of the few major online platforms available in Russia without bypassing blocks. End-to-end encryption is enabled only in secret chats, which the user must activate manually.
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