The Telegram messenger may be less secure than commonly believed: according to IStories, its infrastructure is managed by a man whose companies have cooperated with Russian intelligence. Telegram founder Pavel Durov has repeatedly presented the platform as a space for free speech and digital privacy, especially in authoritarian countries.
However, as IStories wrote, Telegram chats by default do not have end-to-end encryption, unlike WhatsApp or Signal. If a user has not enabled a "secret chat," the correspondence is decrypted and stored on servers. "This means that whoever controls the server can access the correspondence," the publication is quoted as saying.
Who maintains the addresses
This infrastructure is maintained by Global Network Management (GNM), a little-known company from Antigua and Barbuda that has provided Telegram with more than 10,000 IP addresses, IStories found. The owner of GNM, Russian citizen Vladimir Vedeneyev, showed in a U.S. court that the company installs and maintains Telegram's infrastructure and has employees in Russia. According to court documents reviewed by IStories, Vedeneyev also holds the position of chief financial officer at Telegram.
Many of GNM's IP addresses previously belonged to the St. Petersburg telecommunications company Globalnet, which the publication links to the Kremlin and Russian intelligence services, including the FSB. Another 5,000 Telegram IP addresses, according to IStories, were obtained from another St. Petersburg company, Electrontelecom, which the publication calls an FSB contractor: it was involved in installing and maintaining secure communication systems for intelligence operations.
In 2022, Globalnet, at the demand of Roskomnadzor, implemented systems for monitoring user traffic. Oleg Matveychev, deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, said at the time that Telegram and the FSB had reached a "compromise": the messenger installed infrastructure allowing authorities to monitor users involved in criminal cases, such as terrorism suspects.
Device identifier
In addition to decrypting and storing messages, Telegram attaches a unique device identifier to each one — "auth_key_id," cybersecurity expert Michal Wozniak told IStories. Using it, the platform identifies the user's device and selects the necessary decryption key. Combined with metadata — IP addresses and timestamps — this system, according to Wozniak, makes it possible to establish a person's physical location and contacts.
"If someone has access to Telegram's traffic and cooperates with Russian intelligence, this means that the device identifier becomes a really big problem — a tool for global surveillance of the messenger's users, wherever they are and whichever server they connect to," he told IStories.
Telegram's response
On Tuesday, Telegram stated that none of its contractors has access to user data or critical infrastructure and that the company has no employees or servers in Russia.
"All Telegram servers belong to Telegram and are maintained by Telegram employees. Unauthorized access is impossible. Telegram has no employees or servers in Russia. Throughout its history, Telegram has never handed over personal messages to third parties, and its encryption has never been cracked," the press service said in a statement.
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