Representatives of the Telegram messenger commented on an investigation by Russian journalists, which stated that part of Telegram’s server infrastructure is maintained by a company that works for the FSB.
Representatives of the Telegram messenger commented on an investigation by Russian journalists, which stated that part of Telegram’s server infrastructure is maintained by a company that works for the FSB.
Telegram’s press service told the BBC Russian Service that the company «has contracts with dozens of different service providers around the world,» but none of them «has access to Telegram data or confidential infrastructure.»
«All Telegram servers belong to Telegram and are maintained by Telegram employees. Unauthorized access is impossible. Telegram has no employees or servers in Russia. In its entire history, Telegram has never transferred private messages to third parties, and its encryption has never been broken,» the messenger’s press service said.
Recall, on June 10, the publication «Important Stories» published an investigation entitled «How Telegram is connected to the FSB.» It states that «the messenger’s infrastructure is responsible for the Ts, who serve the secret complexes of the Russian special services, which are used to monitor citizens.» The Federal Security Service of Russia can monitor Telegram users around the world. All messages sent to Telegram are decrypted and stored on servers, and not on devices, as is the case with WhatsApp and Signal, which allow end-to-end encryption in all chats.
The investigators found that part of Telegram’s server infrastructure is maintained by a company owned by the Durov brothers' partner from the VKontakte days, Vladimir Vedeneev. According to Vazhnye istorii, this company provides installation and maintenance services for FSB surveillance systems.
At the same time, it turned out that Vedeneev is not only the owner of the company that services almost the entire Telegram infrastructure, but also holds the position of CFO in the messenger itself. Until 2020, Telegram IP addresses, which are now controlled by GNM, belonged to another company from St. Petersburg — Globalnet. The integrated backbone communications operator, which owns fiber-optic networks throughout Russia with a length of more than 18 thousand km, provides communications services, in particular, to the Main Research Computing Center of the Presidential Administration of the Russian Federation.
Officially, this agency is responsible for ensuring summits, hotlines, and meetings with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, but unofficially, it is a closed analytical center working in the interests of the FSB, FSO, Ministry of Internal Affairs, and Ministry of Defense. In particular, the center is engaged in surveillance of Russians on the Internet and develops all-Russian video surveillance systems with facial recognition.
In addition to the fact that Telegram users' messages are decrypted and stored on servers, the messengers add a device identifier called auth_key_id to each message, says digital security expert Mykhailo Voznyak. According to him, this identifier is used to select the key for decrypting messages on the Telegram server device side. In practice, this means that the person through whom the messenger traffic passes can track device identifiers and, in combination with other data, such as IP addresses and the time of sending messages, determine the person’s location and establish with whom they interact via the messenger
Vladimir Vedeneyev told Varlamov News that «all Telegram equipment is isolated,» and his company did not use its equipment «to analyze, filter, or monitor Telegram traffic.»
