TECH

Telegram, the application that shook Brazil

When a court decision ordered the blocking of the WhatsApp messaging application for 48 hours in February 2015, a competitor, previously little known in Brazil, became an alternative to impatient users. Immediately, 2 million Brazilians lowered the Telegram, whose popularity began to grow. The definitive fame, however, came with the recent leakage of talks between prosecutors of the Lava Jato task force and Justice Minister Sergio Moro - federal judge in Curitiba at the time of the dialogues. The platform denied that its servers had been hacked, suggesting that the messages were obtained through attacks on the victims' devices. Only three days passed until the company was a victim of hackers. This time, only confirmed the case and reassure users, concerned about the exposure of their data.
The positioning of the company exposed the latent concern in preserving its image. Since its inception, the application has garnered users with the promise of ensuring privacy and unlimited space for everyone. Members of the Federal Public Ministry joined the messenger, persuaded by their exclusive resources. In secret chats, for example, conversations are protected by end-to-end encryption - allowing only sender and receiver to see their content - and are not recorded on the server. In practice, it means that dialogs will not appear when a new session is connected to the account. The sending of self-destructive messages made the Telegram even more seductive, especially for authorities who deal daily with sensitive information. It was enough to determine the time for the conversation to go away after viewing. All this apparent security was not enough for the high ranking man responsible for the main operation of the country to leave unscathed offenses of criminals.
Last Wednesday, it came to the fore that prosecutors, federal delegates, judges and journalists were also among the victims. According to the MPF, the scheme works in three stages. First, the hacker discovers the victim's cell phone number, using it to request the opening of a new session on the Telegram. The application then forwards, via SMS, an access code to the victim's device. At that moment, the criminal calls the victim, usually a number from abroad, and captures, with a technique still unknown by the investigators, the content of the SMS. With the code, the hacker accesses the Telegram account and sees all conversations that are not protected by a special configuration. The invasion runs counter to the application's proposal, which has always wanted to consolidate itself as a secure platform. Pavel Durov-CEO Telegram That was the thought of Russian Pavel Durov, 35. Beside his brother Nikolai, he developed the platform to be able to talk without risk of being spied on by the government of his country. The idea came when they still owned the largest social network in Russia, the Vkontakte (VK), which was created in 2006. The success of the venture was so great that it earned Pavel the nickname "Russian Zuckerberg". The platform's potential aroused political interests, which were not attended to by the brothers. They refused to provide the government with data of Ukrainian separatists and to block pages of opponents of the presidential candidate at the time, Vladimir Putin. The denial involved the invasion of Pavel's house by the police. Following reprisals, a joint government fund, United Capital Partners, acquired in 2013 40% of VK. The following year, the Durov brothers left the command of the social network to dedicate themselves to the new application, which quickly attracted glances. Pavel and Nikolai secretly established a company in Buffalo, New York, and took some loyal VK employees to the US. The secret project was the Telegram.
The platform has become one of the preferred means of communication of the Islamic State. Through it, the terrorist group took responsibility for attacks, such as that of Paris, which resulted in 129 deaths, and the attack on the Russian plane that crashed in Egypt killing 224 people. In response, the Telegram deactivated 78 public discussion groups related to terrorists, without affecting users. No data, however, was released by the application, which reinforced its commitment to the confidentiality of private information.
The Telegram differentials have brought more than 200 million people to the platform worldwide - still far from the 1.5 billion that communicate through WhatsApp. The brand was celebrated by Durov in his official blog, noting that the Telegram does not promote itself with ads. In the face of recent attacks on in-app accounts, official demonstrations tend to be recurrent. It remains to know what will be greater: the headache to the authorities involved in the leaks or the platform's challenge in maintaining the growing user base.
Pavel Durov, the CEO of Telegram, left Russia with the $ 260 million fortune he accumulated by creating the VK social network. He only wears black and used to travel constantly around the world, staying in apartments rented via Airbnb. In addition to disagreements with the Kremlin, he faced threats from Russian armed gangs. In 2012, he and some of his employees threw to the crowd, from the window of the office, almost $ 5,000 in airplanes made of money. Each plane was shaped with a note of 5,000 rubles, about $ 300. Rodrigo Castro, Brazil