‎Telegram Messenger App

But according to Pavel, Telegram disclosed data for 203 legal requests from the Brazilian government in January to September 2024 and 6,992 legal requests from India, its largest market, during that period. Its data centers are spread across a complex corporate structure of shell companies in various jurisdictions to avoid compliance with government subpoenas. Telegram is registered as a company in the British Virgin Islands and as an LLC in Dubai. It was the most downloaded app worldwide in January 2021, with 1 billion downloads globally as of late August 2021. Its servers are distributed worldwide with several data centers, and its headquarters are in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

• The criminal activity of 25 people was confirmed and copies of 30 databases were seized.
• In December 2015, two researchers from Aarhus University published a report in which they demonstrated that MTProto 1.0 did not achieve indistinguishability under chosen-ciphertext attack (IND-CCA) or authenticated encryption.
• In June 2017, Pavel Durov in an interview said that U.S. intelligence agencies tried to bribe the company’s developers to weaken Telegram’s encryption or install a backdoor during their visit to the U.S. in 2016.
• Telegraph natively supports Instant View, a feature which lets users read full articles in the chat with no load time and without opening an external browser.
• All issues were patched before the paper’s publication with a security bounty paid out to the researchers.

Telegram Group Bot

Twelve days later, Telegram told its users that the Brazilian Congressional Bill No. 2630 against online disinformation, which was about to be approved, would end freedom of speech in the country. Throughout 2020, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps used groups and channels to dox Iraqi and Iranian citizens, while sharing propagandistic posts on the platform. Following efforts by Telegram to remove ISIS-related content from the platform, the terrorist organization reportedly moved its recruitment groups to the dark web, with US officials citing the app’s purging of terrorist content as particularly effective at deplatforming ISIS. The ban applied to non-U.S.-based purchasers as well, because Telegram could not prevent the re-sale of Grams to U.S. citizens on a secondary market, as the anonymity of users was one of the key features of TON. Durov planned to power TON with the existing Telegram user base, and turn it into the largest blockchain and a platform for apps and services akin to a decentralized WeChat, Google Play, and App Store.

Nicegram: Web3 for Telegram X

Specific users can be tagged in the group by adding @username to a message, where “username” is that particular user’s username. Ownership of channels and groups can be transferred to one of the admins if the owner wishes to give up their rights. They support flexible admin rights and can use bots for moderation to prevent spam and unwanted activity. Secret Chats restrict screenshotting from Android devices and warn when one is taken from an iOS device, while also hiding the chat contents from the final image. Any user can also send a message to a special “Saved Messages” chat as a form of bookmarking them. Sticker packs are made by Telegram designers as well as regular users and can be shared via links.

On 9 June 2019, The Intercept released leaked Telegram messages exchanged between current Brazilian Minister of Justice and former judge Sérgio Moro and federal prosecutors. Login SMS messages are known to have been intercepted in Iran, Russia and Germany, possibly in coordination with phone or telecom companies. In April 2016, several Russian opposition members’ accounts were hijacked by intercepting the SMS messages used for login authorization. MTProto 2.0 is seen by qualified cryptographers as a vast improvement to Telegram’s security. The Telegram team responded that the flaw does not affect message security and that “a future patch would address the concern”. Nevertheless, they said they saw “no reason why Telegram should use a less secure encryption scheme when more secure (and at least as efficient) solutions exist”.

Related topics about Telegram

• On 19 June 2022, Telegram announced that it had reached 700 million monthly active users.
• Premium users have access to extra stickers, emoji, reactions, and customization features like a special badge and the ability to change the look of their messages in chats.
• In March 2014, Telegram promised that “all code will be released eventually”, including all the various client applications (Android, iOS, desktop, etc.) and the server-side code.

On 24 August 2024, Pavel Durov, who is both a French and UAE citizen, was arrested in France by French authorities. The post included a screenshot showing an internal email sent by the App Store to developers, demanding the takedown of content related to Navalny. Navalny’s spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh called the block and the deletion of the tactical voting app from app stores “censorship … imposed by private companies”.

Groups and channels

The protocol was developed by Nikolai Durov and other developers at Telegram and, as of version 2.0, is based on 256-bit symmetric AES encryption, 2048-bit RSA encryption and Diffie–Hellman key exchange. In July 2018, Telegram introduced their online authorization and identity-management system, Telegram Passport, for platforms that require real-life identification. When an author adds links to YouTube, Vimeo, or Twitter, the service allows you to embed their content directly in the article.

Features

In September 2015, Telegram announced that the app had 60 million active users and delivered 12 billion daily messages. Telegram also has social networking features, allowing users to post stories, create large public groups with up to 200,000 members, or share one-way updates to unlimited audiences in so-called channels. It allows users to exchange messages, share media and files, and hold private and group voice or video calls as well as public livestreams. It supports rich group chats with up to 200,000 members, custom folders, bots, and even self-destructing messages for privacy. The National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine enforced the restrictions following evidence reported to them by Kyrylo Budanov, showing Russia’s ability to access messages and user data on the platform. They criticized how, unless modified first, the default general security model stores all contacts, messages and media together with their decryption keys on its servers continuously; and that it does not enable end-to-end encryption for messages by default.

On 26 February 2014, the German consumer organization Stiftung Warentest evaluated several data-protection aspects of Telegram, along with other popular instant-messaging clients. The bug was fixed on the day of the publication with a $100,000 payout to the author and a statement on Telegram’s official blog. Telegram has defended the lack of ubiquitous end-to-end encryption by saying that online-backups that do not use client-side encryption are “the most secure solution currently possible”. The desktop clients, excluding the macOS client, do not feature options for end-to-end encrypted messages.

Telegram has stated that the company will never serve advertisements in private chats. A distinctive feature of this version is the ability to view channels/groups on a specific topic without censorship, which cannot be viewed from an app distributed from Google Play or the Apple Store due to their policies.citation needed For encrypted chats (branded as Secret Chats), Telegram uses a custom-built symmetric encryption scheme called MTProto. In October 2024, Telegram launched a verification platform, called Telegram Gateway, allowing third-party services to authenticate their users by sending verification codes via Telegram. In December 2020, Telegram launched a Bugs and Suggestions platform, where users can submit bug reports and suggestion cards for new features.

Telegram also offers an API that allows developers to create bots, which are accounts controlled by programs. Telegram has public APIs with which developers can access the same functionality as Telegram’s official apps to build their own instant messaging applications. Telegram stated that it does not have access to the data, while the platform will share the information only with the authorized recipient.

Forwarded messages also maintain reply formatting, able to show which messages in a thread are replying to others. Users can schedule messages to send at a particular time or when their conversation partner comes online, as well as choose to send a message “without sound” without a notification. Some stickers feature full-screen effects that play out when first sent or when tapped. By default, any account that is inactive for 6 months is automatically deleted, though the period can be shortened or extended up to 18 months through the Settings menu. In October 2014, South Korean government surveillance plans drove many of its citizens to switch to Telegram from the Korean app KakaoTalk. Users can use Telegram’s transparency bot to check how many legal requests from their country it has processed.

They also found that attackers had the theoretical ability to reorder messages coming from the client to the server though the attacker would not be able to see the content of the messages. It took 11 days for the database to be taken down, but the researchers say the data was accessed by other parties, including a hacker who reported the information to a specialized forum. In March 2014, Telegram promised that “all code will be released eventually”, including all the various client applications (Android, iOS, desktop, etc.) and the server-side code.

The NDR stated that they had not noticed these ads before, but closed the channel, stating that an advertisement-based accumulation of Toncoin, albeit unsolicited and not withdrawn, was unacceptable for a German public media broadcaster. In August 2025, the German public media broadcaster NDR closed its tagesschau Telegram channel, which published summaries of news stories from the German television news service by the same name. The most common mode of fraud involves scammers sending messages to unsuspecting users, offering part-time online jobs which comprise a series of tasks. It is estimated that the bot contains data from 26 million Ukrainians registered in the Diia application. The company has a verified channel called “Stop Child Abuse”, where daily statistics on the number of groups and channels banned for sharing illegal materials are posted. British far-right publication TR.news, following multiple deplatformings, launched a Telegram channel to spread its posts and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue reported that Irish far-right groups grew substantially between 2019 and 2020.

TON Telegram Open Network

Telegram made substantial efforts to ban illegal content such as child abuse and pro-terrorist channels, including a partnership with Europol to eliminate IS presence on the platform, but communities of far-right extremist users are still on the app. In the same year, Telegram reportedly banned more than 350,000 bots and channels, including those that contained child abuse and terrorism-related content. In late 2020, Durov announced that the company was working on its own ad platform, and would integrate non-targeted ads in public one-to-many channels, that already were selling and displaying ads in the form of regular messages. Users can however import chat history, including both messages and media, from WhatsApp, Line, and KakaoTalk due to data portability, either making a new chat to hold the messages or adding them to an existing one. Telegram allows groups, bots and channels with a verified social media or Wikipedia page to be verified, but not individual user accounts. Telegram’s FAQ page says it does not process requests related to illegal content in chats and group chats, and that “to this day, we have disclosed 0 bytes of user messages to third parties, including governments”.

Changing the phone number in the app will automatically reassign the user’s account to that number without exporting data or notifying their contacts. In March 2025, Pavel Durov announced that Telegram surpassed 1 billion monthly active users. In July 2023, Telegram surpassed 800 million monthly active users, later reaching 900 million in March 2024 and 950 million in July 2024. On 19 June 2022, Telegram announced that it had reached 700 million monthly active users. On 8 January 2021, Pavel announced in a blog post that Telegram had reached “about 500 million” monthly active users.

Premium users have the ability to set any chat folder as the default screen in the app while regular users will always see the full chat list when first opening the app. Messages from private chats can be forwarded, with an option to hide the original sender’s identity or to hide captions from media messages. Reactions are always on in private chats and can be enabled by admins in groups and channels with the ability to allow or exclude specific reactions. Users have the option to delete messages and whole chats for both themself and other participants.

They can respond to messages or mentions directly or can be invited into groups, and are able to perform tasks, integrate with other programs and host mini apps. The Devices submenu shows all of the active devices on a user’s account and allows them to remotely log out from those devices. Similarly, users can hide their phone number and profile photo from people based on categories such as Non-Contacts or by adding exceptions.

The attack relied on people downloading a malware-infected file from any source, at which point it would replace Telegram files on the device and ‘clone’ session data. The accounts were extracted from not Telegram but an unofficial version of Telegram, in what appears to be a possibly government-sanctioned fork. Security company Group-IB suggested SS7 mobile signalling protocol weaknesses, illegal usage of surveillance equipment, or telecom insider attacks. On 12 June 2019, Telegram confirmed that it suffered a denial-of-service attack which disrupted normal app functionality for approximately one hour. The Telegram team tweeted that it was either because the user had malware or they were not using two-step verification.

App specs

An investigation published in August 2024 by the BBC showed that Telegram has not responded to requests to join the US–based National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), nor from the UK–based Internet Watch Foundation, both non–profit NGOs. This was done without prior agreement or knowledge of the women, causing intense public backlash and demand for the group to be shut down. In January 2021, North Macedonian media outlets reported that a now-banned Telegram group, with more than 7,000 members, titled “Public Room” (“Јавна соба”) was used to share nude photos of women, often young teenage girls. It also provides an email address dedicated to reports of content related to child abuse. Telegram has been used to distribute illegal pornography, including child pornography.

The blocking of the main Smart Voting bot was criticized by allies of Alexei Navalny, a Kremlin critic and former opposition leader. Hundreds of pages of a group chat between Rosselló and members of his staff were leaked. Andriy Kovalenko, head of the security council’s centre on countering disinformation, clarified that the ban was limited to official devices and did not extend to personal phones. Telegram has been blocked temporarily or permanently by some governments including Iran, China, Brazil, and Pakistan.

Channel owners are able to use Telegram to create giveaways, randomly awarding channel members with prizes such as Telegram Premium subscriptions to their followers, based on certain criteria. Channels offer detailed statistics on view counts, user growth and interactions, also visible only to admins. Posting in the channel https://chickenroadapp.in/ is anonymous, though admins can choose to add signatures to their posts. Secret Chats support perfect forward secrecy and switch encryption keys after a key has been used 100 times or a week has passed.