The administration of the Telegram social network has temporarily blocked at least five Ukrainian OSINT channels. Several Russian and Belarusian OSINT resources on the messenger have also been banned.
(The news is supplemented with a Telegram comment).
The administration of the Telegram social network has temporarily blocked at least five Ukrainian OSINT channels. Several Russian and Belarusian OSINT resources on the messenger have also been banned.
(The news is supplemented with a Telegram comment).
«Yesterday and today, Telegram deleted the channels of Ukrainian OSINTers without explanation. In particular, we are talking about the Telegram channels OSINT-bees, OSINT Flow, KRIG war OSINT Analytics, Cat Eyes OSINT. Also, we are currently unable to view the OSINT Vatra news channel,» the «NotaYenota» community on Facebook reported .
The report states that several Russian OSINT channels were blocked along with Ukrainian channels.
The Ethical Hacker Project announced the blocking of more than 10 such channels. Among them are Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarusian: @osint_pythons, @schwarz_osint, @OSINTBY, @Osint_san_framework, @trueosint. It was also impossible to view the content of the OSINT Vatra channel.
«Each of the channels has been running for more than several years and has not violated the community rules. Since there has been no news from Telegram support for more than a day, we ask you to draw attention to this situation and, if possible, write such a message to Telegram technical support,» the project administrators noted.
«OSINT Bees» stated that Telegram blocks Ukrainian OSINT channels in the interests of the Russian Federation. «We are sure that this is not an accident, but a targeted attack on Ukrainian analytical communities. Telegram acts in the interests of Russia — a state that committed armed aggression against Ukraine, and for years has been waging war not only on the battlefield, but also in the information space. Therefore, we believe that the founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov, also acts in the interests of Russian special services! This decision is another proof that our activities are yielding results and hitting the enemy,» the community informs.
«OSINT Bees» also emphasized that Telegram has blocked almost all channels that deal with «applied, combat OSINT.» And this is an unfriendly step towards the Defense Forces.
At 5:00 PM on June 28, the Telegram channels OSINT-bees, OSINT Flow, KRIG war, and Cat Eyes OSINT were unblocked.
«NotaEnota» also shared backup pages of Ukrainian osinters:
UPD. Telegram commented on the blocking of channels. «The channels you mentioned were temporarily unavailable due to an error. Access to them was restored within a few hours,» the messenger employee Remi Vaughn told dev.ua.
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 FSB, which serves 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 that works 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.»
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.
