What chat software are hackers using?
Hackers take privacy seriously, so they choose chat software very carefully.
Using skype N years ago, (already decrypted)
Using GBwhatapp three years ago (has been cracked)
In the past two years, I have switched to Telegram, a chat software that no one in the world can monitor.
Let me introduce the Telegram development team
It is completely different from the various entrepreneurial stories and business legends that people know, but it has all the elements of a legendary story: master hackers, politics, totalitarianism, conspiracy… The rich, everything is available.
Before founding Telegram, Pavel Durov was known as the founder of the Russian social networking site VK. Pavel Durov founded VK in 2006 with his older brother Nikolai Durov, and in the following years it became the most popular social networking site in the Russian-speaking region. Pavel Durov proudly said more than once that VK is the only product that outperforms Facebook in free market competition. Mark Zuckerberg later admitted that he once thought that Facebook surpassed VK sooner or later, but he did not expect that it has been 10 years and still has not been able to surpass it.
Pavel also made no secret that VK has borrowed a lot from Facebook, he said, after all, I am not a designer, it will take more time to design all by myself. The early VK was completely consistent with Facebook from page design to promotion method. He also started from several famous universities in Russia, but later became more and more different. Pavel Durov is the same age as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, both born in 1984. The media used to always compare these two people, two young Internet upstarts.
But in recent years, the situation has become very strange. For the sake of freedom of speech, Pavel was forced to give up everything he had created and escaped from Russia. Mark Zuckerberg, who lives safely in the United States, has been cooperating with the Russian government’s self-censorship. Pavel often wrote articles to satirize him… see Looking at what Mark and Facebook have done over the years, I totally agree with Pavel’s sarcasm about him.
Since 2011, the development of things has been difficult for Americans to understand, but fortunately we are Chinese, we all understand. This year, life for the Durov brothers started to get tough. They are strong defenders of freedom, arguing that freedom of speech is above all else. At the time, the Russian state security agency asked VK to shut down some of the pages of Putin’s opponents, but Pavel refused. Then heavily armed anti-terrorist police teams raided his residence and office, and there must have been many unknown secret conversations later…
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, Russian security agencies again asked VK to hand over the personal information of a Ukrainian activist. Pavel not only posted the full text of the document, but also posted two pictures of dogs in clothes in a row to mock security officials.
Telegram features encryption, no ads
The sad departure from VK gave Durov a deeper understanding of the power of politics and capital.
In 2013, in order to avoid the police who might come to the door to “check the water meter” at any time, Durov took the core staff of VK and quietly left Russia by plane from St. Petersburg to Buffalo on the border between the United States and Canada in the northeastern United States. His second venture, an encrypted instant messaging app, Telegram.
One of them is his brother Nikolai. As an excellent mathematician and engineer, the encryption protocol MTProto he designed in the future has become one of the core technologies of Telegram.
With an encryption protocol tailored to Telegram, one-to-one chats can be implemented to provide end-to-end encryption. The encryption mode is based on 256-bit symmetric AES encryption, RSA 2048 encryption and Diffie-Hellman’s secure key exchange protocol.
To prove its security, Telegram has promised a $100,000 bonus if it can successfully crack the intercepted communications. Only one person has received the bonus so far, but all he has found is a hidden danger that could cause problems.
In addition, the vulnerability acquisition platform Zerodium also made an offer of up to $500,000 for Telegram’s vulnerabilities.
Unlike other social application giants, Telegram’s staff is very streamlined, basically all of Durov’s cronies, and basically top-level technical personnel who are one to ten.
The reason for this is that the functions on Telegram are not like other chat applications such as WeChat. They need to be equipped with many complicated functions such as news and games. The problems it solves are very simple, one is the chat requirement, and the other is the encryption requirement.
Due to the Prism Gate incident, people in Europe and the United States are paying more and more attention to privacy, which has also allowed Telegram to gain a large number of users.
Durov, who has rarely made public appearances, appeared at a conference in Barcelona in February 2016. In his speech at the time, he announced that Telegram has more than 100 million monthly active users (180 million registered users), and users send daily 15 billion messages, 330,000 registered users worldwide every day. At present, its monthly active users have exceeded 200 million, and it is widely used in Russia and Middle East countries. It currently ranks 9th among similar apps in the world.
Telegram function introduction:
Telegram provides the functions of mainstream instant messaging tools. We can use it to send text, pictures, emoticons, stickers, files, voice, etc. (the maximum size of a single file is 1.5 GB), and we can also chat in groups.
Telegram provides full-platform clients, including web, desktop (PC/Mac/Linux), and mobile (Android/iOS/WP). Chat records are stored in the cloud, and no matter which client is used, you can see consistent chat records.
Telegram has two features: secret chat and chat address.
Secret Chat allows contacts to encrypt chat messages in an end-to-end manner, which cannot be decrypted even with server-side permissions. End-to-end encrypted chat history is not synced between clients and is only visible on the device currently in use. Secret chat can also set the self-destruction time of the message, which will burn immediately after reading. However, after testing, mobile phone screenshots can still be used when secretly chatting, so when you want to send private content, you must also consider whether the other party is trustworthy.
Chat address allows users to have a chat address at telegram.me/YourUsernameHere, and anyone who opens this address can start chatting with you (registration required). This feature is optional and will not be enabled as long as username is not set.
On the basis of providing rich functions, Telegram’s user experience is very good, surpassing almost all similar software. Its interface is simple, the operation is intuitive, the feedback is fast, and I believe that people who have tried it will understand it.
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