Russia’s Rostec is said to have bought a platform that allows it to uncover the identities of anonymous Telegram users, which could be used to stifle unfavorable news outside the country.

Rostekh is a state defense technology and systems corporation that includes 800 enterprises and 15 companies,

The organization, which plays an active role in monitoring the flow of information inside the country, is particularly interested in the identity of the administrators of the Telegram channel who criticize the Russian state.

This is reported by Russian media outlets Bell and Medusa, which investigated the case after a series of arrests of anonymous Telegram channel owners and bloggers in 2022.

The Bell presents several cases that have shaken confidence in the security of Telegram, including the arrests of commercial director Ksenia Sobchak Kirill Sukhanov, ex-editor of Tatler magazine Arian Romanovsky, and journalist Tamerlan Bigaev, all users of the “Turn off the light” service. “Telegram channel.

According to the same reports, Rostec subsidiary “Avtomatika” (Автоматика) acquired a St. Petersburg IT company named T.Hunter in 2021, which has developed a product that can be used to identify anonymous users on Telegram.

The tool would be called “Okhotnik” (Охотник), which translates to “hunter”. It is said to use over 700 data points to make associations and correlations that can lead to unmasking otherwise anonymous Telegram users.

Data points are taken from social media, blogs, forums, instant messengers, bulletin boards, cryptocurrency blockchains, darknet and government departments, and relate to names, nicknames, addresses email, websites, domains, crypto wallets, encryption keys, phone numbers, geolocation information, IP addresses, etc.

“Hunter” can find any mistakes made by targeted users at any time in the past, so even the slightest and most distant exposure of their true identity can be used to create paths to de-anonymization.

“Interlocutors of the authors of the “breakthrough” market survey compare “Hunter” to the famous telegram bot Chimera”, reports the bell.

“Similar programs are available on the Internet and on the black market, but they contain, at best, merged databases, where most of the information is outdated, and its relevance must be verified.”

Moreover, unlike these programs, “Hunter” is completely legal, with Russian authorities comparing it to Palantir’s products or Paterva’s Maltego platform.

Rostec plans to sell “Hunter” to all departments of the Russian Interior Ministry and operational and technical units of the country’s Federal Security Service (FSB) by 2023.

A computer expert from Russia’s digital rights organization Roskomsvoboda, which has been classified as a foreign agent by the country’s Justice Ministry since December 2022, said the ‘Hunter’ cannot identify channel owners Telegram using only data points.

Instead, they believe they are using a zero-day vulnerability in the platform or working with a Telegram insider to de-anonymize users.

BleepingComputer has contacted Telegram for comment on the above, but we have yet to receive a response.