Journalists from Important Stories conducted an experiment using Wireshark software to determine who controls Telegram's server infrastructure and has access to its traffic. They found that user device identifiers are transmitted over the network unencrypted, and messages pass through IP addresses belonging to GNM. The company is registered in Antigua and Barbuda and has provided Telegram with more than ten thousand IP addresses.
The Miami lawsuit
The outlet discovered materials from a 2018 GNM lawsuit against a data center in Miami. The company's owner, Vladimir Vedeneyev, a native of Tolyatti, participated in the proceedings and said he was responsible for the installation and "technical support" of Telegram's equipment. According to him, he is "the only person with authorized access to Telegram's servers in the Miami data center," and his company also owns a router in the server room through which the messenger's traffic passes.
In court, Vedeneyev described how he began working with the messenger: "My work with the messenger began when [co-founder] Pavel Durov in St. Petersburg asked me to take the position of financial director, to be responsible for communication with suppliers, signing documents, and so on. And formally I had a power of attorney to sign documents on behalf of Pavel Durov and on behalf of Telegram."
Links to Russian companies
Until 2020, the Telegram IP addresses now controlled by GNM belonged to the St. Petersburg company Globalnet. Its owner until 2024 was Vladimir Vedeneyev, but he later transferred his share to relatives. Vedeneyev's business partner at Globalnet is Roman Venediktov, who studied at an elite military academy and served in the Main Center for Testing and Control of Space Systems of the Ministry of Defense. In the early 2010s, Venediktov began cooperating with the Durov family through his company Peering, which handled traffic for the social network VKontakte.
Globalnet provides communication services to several Russian state enterprises, including those working in the defense sector, among them the Computing Center of the Presidential Property Management Department (GlavNIVTs). In addition, until 2024 Vedeneyev held a stake in another St. Petersburg company, Electrontelecom, which has provided Telegram with more than five thousand IP addresses (according to the European internet registry RIPE).
The journalists obtained internal financial documentation of Electrontelecom for 2024. It shows that Vedeneyev's former company was engaged in the installation and technical maintenance of a "complex for the transmission of special information from stationary facilities of the FSB Directorate for St. Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast, used for conducting operational-search activities for the purposes of fulfilling the state defense order."
"This means that Telegram's server infrastructure is managed by those who at the same time service secret FSB complexes used for surveillance of citizens," Important Stories concludes.
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