Talk To Your Family About Telegram
If you're the tech savvy person in your friend group or family, you have a duty to explain this thing to everyone else.
The funniest thing about the messaging app Telegram is that it alerts people in your phone’s contact list the first time you sign in. Whenever a friend or family member logs into Telegram for the first time, I get a notification. I’ve taken it upon myself to ping these people immediately and ask them a simple question: “Why are you here?”
My favorite response, so far, came from a security researcher friend. “First of all I did not give Telegram access to my contacts so that’s fucked,” he said.
Classic Telegram. Every friend family or friend group has a person that’s more tech savvy and online than everyone else. If that’s you, it’s your duty to download Telegram and see if you know anyone who’s using it. Why?
It’s a great place to monitor conflict zones. Its laissez-faire attitude to content moderation has made it the premiere place to spread propaganda, share uncensored war footage, and watch crimes unfold. I’m there because I’m a journalist and a lot of that stuff is useful to me. But it’s not a secure platform and when I see someone I know sign up, I tell them just how unsafe it is.
Telegram is a place where users can watch gory and uncensored videos of wars across the world. It’s the place where Yevgeny Prigozhin, the now-deceased head of the Wagner mercenary group, criticized how Moscow was fighting its war in Ukraine. It’s the app where people were selling $2,000 phones that let anyone make robocalls.
Security researchers recently identified malware that uses Telegram’s API as the command and control to spread its malignant software. There’s a tool called Close-Circuit Telegram Vision that allows people to watch the real time movements of some nearby Telegram users. It’s a place where a relative told me, ominously, she’d come to meet a friend who was “educating her on the government and other things.”
Another friend who joined Telegram told me he’d picked it up after meeting a woman on Reddit. The woman said she lived in Hong Kong and suggested they move the conversation over to Telegram. “Should have seen it coming, but it was some penny stock pump and dump scam,” he later told me on Telegram. “Real person behind it, seemed legit at first but then all ‘my uncle says this stock is a winner!’” He deleted his Telegram account after sending me that message.
Never follow an anonymous person online to a secondary messaging app.
Last year, scammers conned a 56 year old man out of $350,000 after luring him into a crypto group on Telegram. Before his return to X, Telegram was the premiere place to follow avowed white nationalist Nicholas Fuentes. The Islamic State used Telegram to recruit people.
“This messaging app has transformed into a bustling hub where seasoned cyber criminals and newcomers alike exchange illicit tools and insights creating a dark and well-oiled supply chain of tools and victims’ data. Free samples, tutorials, kits, even hackers-for-hire — everything needed to construct a complete end-to-end malicious campaign,” said a report about Telegram from security researchers Guardio.
Telegram is on my mind lately because its CEO has a history of attacking Signal, an app that’s become the default “secure” messenger for many. It uses end-to-end encryption by default and users can set their messages to vanish after a set period of time. Like Telegram, it also pings people in your contact list when you sign up, but I don’t warn people when I see that notification. Signal isn’t perfect, but it’s leagues better than Telegram.
The competition between the apps got heated recently when Telegram CEO Pavel Durov called out Signal for being insecure. He also said the app has ties to the U.S. government, something he’s claimed before. Even Elon Musk weighed in, criticizing perceived vulnerabilities in the secure messaging app. There’s no evidence this is true.
No app is perfectly secure, but some apps are more secure than others. “[Druov] has recently been making a big conspiracy push to promote Telegram as more secure than Signal. This is like promoting ketchup as better for your car than synthetic motor oil. Telegram isn’t a secure messenger, full stop,” Matthew Green, a cryptography expert who teaches at John Hopkins, said on X.
“I don’t really care which messenger you use. I just want you to understand the stakes. If you use Telegram, we experts cannot even begin to guarantee that your communications are confidential. In fact at this point I assume they are not, even in Secret Chats mode,” Green said. “You should do what you want with this information. Think about confidentiality matters. Think about where Telegram operates its servers and what government jurisdictions they work in. Decide if you care about this.”
You should care. If you’re reading this and you have any idea how any of this tech works, it’s on you to warn your family about the app. Sign up. You might be shocked which of your family members is using it.