Telegram founder says he suspects the Russian police in recent hacking scandal

Russian police have apparently begun pressuring mobile phone operators to intercept authorization text messages generated by the messaging app Telegram, according to the service's creator, Pavel Durov.

Durov said in a characteristically colorful statement published on the radio station Echo of Moscow that such policing measures are usually adopted by the “cannibalistic regimes that don't care about their own reputations” in Central Asia and sometimes in the Middle East. Durov was addressing a scandal last week where oppositionists Oleg Kozlovsky and Georgy Alburov reported several attempts to hack their Telegram accounts. The two men say they believe that Russian police utilized a federal surveillance system to force their mobile phone operator, MTS, to surrender SMS data to the authorities.

Given the political activism of Kozlovsky and Alburov, Durov argues that it is unlikely that MTS intercepted their text messages without outside interference. Telegram's creator says the Russian authorities were likely involved, and he encourages the app's users to choose two-factor verification to ensure reliable security against similar hacks.

“This is how I use Telegram: I've got two-factor authentication (there's a password on the account), the account is tied to an SIM card in a reasonable jurisdiction, and at delicate moments I move my conversations to secret chats. In principle, any of these measures by itself protects your important information. What's risk is using none of these options,” Durov wrote on Echo of Moscow.

Kozlovsky and Alburov say they received notifications about unauthorized attempts to access their Telegram accounts on April 29. The login attempts generated SMS messages with authorization codes, which neither Kozlovsky nor Alburov ever received. Kozlovsky says a technical support representative from MTS, his mobile phone operator, told him that his text messaging service had been disconnected at the time of the Telegram authorization requests. Kozlovsky says he was not given a reason. MTS later declared in a statement to the press that there'd been no targeted interruption in Kozlovsky's SMS service.