The technical infrastructure that underpins Telegram is controlled by a man whose companies have collaborated with Russian intelligence services. A company owned by a Russian network engineer named Viktor Vedeneev controls thousands of Telegram IP addresses and maintains its servers. Vedeneev’s other companies have a history of collaborating with Russia’s defense sector, the FSB security service, and other highly sensitive agencies. Because of the way Telegram’s encryption protocols work, even users who use its “end-to-end” encryption features are vulnerable to being tracked by anyone who can monitor its network traffic. Telegram, the wildly popular chat and messaging app, is the pride of the Russian IT industry. According to Pavel Durov, the enigmatic entrepreneur who created the service twelve years ago, it now has over a billion monthly active users around the world. Among the reasons for this success is Telegram’s reputation for security, coupled with Durov’s image as a free speech champion who has defied multiple governments. (…) When reporters investigated who controls the infrastructure that keeps Telegram’s billions of messages flowing, they found a man with no public profile but unparalleled access: Vladimir Vedeneev, a 45-year-old network engineer. Vedeneev owns the company that maintains Telegram’s networking equipment and assigns thousands of its IP addresses. Court documents show that he was granted exclusive access to some of Telegram’s servers and was even empowered to sign contracts on Telegram’s behalf. There is no evidence that this company has worked with the Russian government or provided any data. But two other closely linked Vedeneev companies — one of which also assigns Telegram IP addresses, and another which did so until 2020 — have had multiple highly sensitive clients tied to the security services. Among their clients is the FSB intelligence agency; a secretive “research computing center” that helped plan the invasion of Ukraine and developed tools to deanonymize internet users; and a flagship state-owned nuclear research laboratory.
via occrp: Telegram, the FSB, and the Man in the Middle
By Telegram FZ LLC – Derivate from File:Telegram Logo.webp, Public Domain, Link