Telegram, the FSB, and the Man in the Middle

Summary

This version was translated and edited by OCCRP, full story is available in RussianTelegram, 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.“Unlike some of our competitors, we don’t trade privacy for market share,” he wrote this April. “In its 12-year history, Telegram has never disclosed a single byte of private messages.”But IStories’ new investigation reveals a critical vulnerability.When we investigated who controls the infrastructure that keeps Telegram’s billions of messages flowing, we 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.Without you, there is no usSupport IStories — it helps us to continue telling the truth“If true, this reporting highlights the dangerous disconnect between what many believe about Telegram’s security and privacy featu...