The situation is quite complicated. When the secret services are involved, it could not be otherwise. The tip comes, in fact, by cross roads, from an intelligence report on the newly elected President Donald Trump, stolen who knows how and then ended up online which, among the many "confidential" information contained in its 35 pages, also emphasizes security of online communications.
Telegram is one of the many instant messaging applications such as WhatsApp, founded by the Russian Pavel Durov, which is rapidly enjoying success with us too, but which is used above all in countries where censorship does not joke like, for example, Russia and Iran. The allegations reported in the "top secret" document of the stars and stripes intelligence accuse the application not to guarantee any security in the conversations even if they do not explain the procedure used by the Russian "spies" to violate the program and when this happened.
Spying operation?
Pavel Durov, the developer of Telegram, is convinced that it's all a staging and that the report is a fake. His program, he says, is secure and offers end-to-end encryption that is activated via the "secret chat“, To which are added other security features such as, for example, the possibility of setting the deletion of messages - sent and received - after a given period of time. Perhaps, Durov explains, the intelligence report refers to the question of the interception of some messages by the FSB which occurred in April 2016 against two anti Putin political activists. An operation wanted by the Moscow government, with the complicity of the Russian telephone provider MTS which would have provided the telephone numbers of the two "suspects" and then communicated them to the Russian secret services. It is not, therefore, which was a violation of Telegram, but a full-blown espionage operation.
Armored Telegram
The truth, and those who use Telegram know this very well, is that to activate it it is enough to know the phone number of a person to pretend to be her. And that is why to avoid this risk it is advisable to activate two-step authentication to increase security. Or use, for truly private conversations, the option “secret chat". At this point, one wonders who is right: the United States Intelligence report advising against using Telegram, or the Telegram developer defending himself against an accusation that he considers absolutely unfounded. Who knows if the truth about this story will ever come to light.
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