The technical infrastructure that underpins Telegram is controlled by a man whose companies have collaborated with Russian intelligence services. An investigation by IStories

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.

“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.

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“If true, this reporting highlights the dangerous disconnect between what many believe about Telegram’s security and privacy features, and the reality," said John Scott-Railton, a Senior Researcher at The Citizen Lab. "When people don't know what is actually going on, but assume they have metadata privacy, they can unknowingly make risky choices, bringing danger to themselves and the people they’re communicating with. This is doubly true if the Russian government sees them as a threat."

A Ukrainian IT specialist who spoke with IStories on condition of anonymity said that the Russian military has used “man-in-the-middle” type surveillance in his country after capturing network infrastructure.

"You get physical access to the data transmission channel and install your equipment there,” he said. “In such an attack, the hackers aren’t even interested so much in the user's correspondence. They get metadata to analyze. And that means IP addresses, user locations, who exchanges data packets with whom, the kind of data it is… really, all possible information.”

Durov is currently under investigation in France after being arrested last August on charges related to the circulation of illegal content on Telegram. The company has since implemented a number of measures to crack down and step up its collaboration with the authorities. Durov has been released under judicial supervision and is allowed to travel.

He did not reply to requests for comment. Vedeneev spoke with IStories but declined to make any of his comments public.