Two journalistic vehicles opposed to the Russian government accuse the country of having a tool capable of breaking the anonymity of Telegram users. The allegations come after an investigation carried out since the middle of last year, as a result of the arrest of journalists and directors of groups opposed to the country’s government, who would also be responsible for managing groups on the messaging platform.
The targets would be spaces for sharing information contrary to government interests. Such groups would be in the sights of Rostec, a state-owned defense technology and systems company, whose subsidiary called Avtomatika would have developed a system capable of discovering the identity of users from different sources of information, crossed automatically to deliver an identity.
All it takes is one slip-up in a post, such as forgetting to delete a photo’s metadata or indicating one’s location in a post, for the work to begin. From social networks, blogs, forums, apps, cryptocurrency wallets and official government records, as well as cellular telemetry, the Okhotnik (hunt, in Russian) software would be able to deliver the identity of the person responsible for the publication to the authorities.
According to The Bell, a newspaper opposed to the government of Vladimir Putin, at least three people have already been arrested after having their privacy violated in this way, including two directors of an equally opposed magazine and a journalist. The success of the undertakings would have led Rostec to offer the Okhotnik to other Russian government agencies, in a work of identifying more dissidents that would be carried out since the beginning of this year.
Russia’s digital civil rights organization Roskomsvoboda went further and said the software would not be able to locate anonymous users using data streams alone. Its representatives speculate about the use of a flaw still unknown to Telegram’s own administrators, as well as working with internal agents of the company to reach users of the platform, in what would be yet another flagrant breach in their privacy.
In response, Telegram claimed that the groups made available on the platform were created in such a way that not even the company itself is able to identify its administrators. The idea is to encourage the use of the solution in protests or disclosure of information in controlled regimes, and any form of identification of users based on publications made by them or the use of non-anonymous resources, such as payments, for example.
The company also warned about the use of bots in discussion channels or third-party applications to access Telegram, whose terms of use and information collection may be different from those of the platform itself. The company did not comment directly on the possible actions of the Russian government, but recommended as a security measure the exclusive use of official solutions.
Rostec did not comment on the matter, as well as the Russian government itself, which also did not take a position on the allegations.
Source: The Bell, Bleeping Computer
