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HomeLatest NewsPolitical technologists from Israeli special forces seized Telegram - Rossiyskaya Gazeta

Political technologists from Israeli special forces seized Telegram – Rossiyskaya Gazeta

Date: March 29, 2024 Time: 00:30:12

The information about Team Jorge (Team Jorge) was published by members of an international investigative consortium, which included journalists from 30 publications, including The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, El País and Haaretz. In the course of an 8-month investigation, the journalists, disguised as clients, dedicated and recorded 6 hours of video of their meetings and negotiations with Tal Khanan.

Team Jorge is a group of manipulative specialists in political public relations based in Israel. According to Hanan, Team Jorge has participated in 33 presidential campaigns, of which 27 were successful. Basically, “Team Jorge” worked in South America, Central America and Africa.

According to the researchers, Equipo Jorge’s key product is the Advanced Impact Media Solutions, or AIMS, program. It controls thousands of fake profiles on Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, Gmail, YouTube, as well as Instagram and Facebook (owned by Meta, a well-known extremist company banned in the Russian Federation). In the future, bot farms are used to promote a beneficial agenda for Team Jorge’s clients on social media and in the media, as well as to spread negative information about their rivals.

Hacking Telegram was one of the ways to obtain such information. Also, on behalf of hacked accounts, you can distribute messages discrediting their owners, in private and public correspondence.

“Many countries believe that Telegram is safe. Now I will show you how safe it is,” Hanan told reporters at a meeting, showing hacked accounts belonging to Kenyans close to then-candidate and now Kenyan President William Ruto.

According to Hanan, he is free to operate on hacked accounts: read their content, as well as post and delete messages on their behalf. The journalists confirmed the fact of hacking, reading correspondence and posting messages from Canaan to the accounts she specified.

Allegedly, a vulnerability in the SS7 protocol was used to hack Telegram accounts.

SS7 is an old protocol developed in the 1970s. Mobile operators use SS7 to route calls and send SMS. Despite the modifications to the protocol, it is still far from modern cybersecurity standards.

An attack using SS7 is classified as Man-in-the-Middle (man-in-the-middle attack) and its essence is that the attacker is embedded between the victim’s smartphone and the telecommunications operator, allowing him to listen in on communications from voice and intercept SMS. , including those used to authorize the user on Telegram.

Such an attack is quite complex, it requires special software that is not available for free sale, as well as hacking and obtaining, for example, corruption, access to items of the telecom operator’s equipment, and highly skilled hackers. Obviously, the costs of such a hacking method are high, they do not guarantee success, and they are always implemented “on request”. Tal Khanan denied all the journalists’ accusations and said he denied any wrongdoing on his part.

Experts were skeptical of Mr. Hanan’s claim.

“Tal Khanan does not provide concrete evidence that his team hacked Telegram user accounts using technical methods. Furthermore, at this time there are no known ways to hack a Telegram account by exploiting certain vulnerabilities without resorting to social engineering methods. It cannot be ruled out that such vulnerabilities will not appear in the future,” says Daniil Chernov, director of the Solar appScreener center at RTK-Solar.

In comments to Rossiyskaya Gazeta, cyber security experts advise following a series of simple steps to protect your Telegram account.

Nikolay Anisenya, head of remote banking security research group, Positive Technologies, does not recommend logging into Telegram using an SMS message code. “If someone gets access to SMS, they can easily log into your account. This process is set up by default, although there are many ways to receive an SMS message. Therefore, we recommend that you go to the Telegram settings and enable two authentication factors,” says the expert.

Daniil Chernov also advises using two-factor authentication: “To protect your Telegram account from being hacked by the methods that are possible today, that is, social engineering methods, you must follow the rules of cyber hygiene. Premium via of dubious bots.”

Although two-factor authentication is generally a reliable method of protection, it is largely ignored by users of social networks and instant messengers around the world. Thus, according to the latest Twitter transparency report, only 2.6% of Twitter users use two-factor authentication, and of Google’s billion users, 150 million use this method of account protection.

Telegram said that the “SS7 vulnerability issue” is widely known and “not exclusive to Telegram and that accounts on any popular social network or messaging app could be vulnerable to hacking if users do not follow security best practices and take precautions”. private accounts”.

In the fall of 2022, Pavel Durov criticized WhatsApp for disclosing a vulnerability in the messenger: “Hackers can get full (!) access to everything on WhatsApp users’ phones. This was made possible by a security issue revealed by WhatsApp last week. What you had to do to control your phone was to send you a malicious video or start a video call with you on WhatsApp,” Durov said at the time. By the end of 2022, Telegram’s audience exceeded 700 million.

* This website provides news content gathered from various internet sources. It is crucial to understand that we are not responsible for the accuracy, completeness, or reliability of the information presented Read More

Hansen Taylor
Hansen Taylor
Hansen Taylor is a full-time editor for ePrimefeed covering sports and movie news.
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