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A database with information about several million users of the Telegram messenger was found on one of the darknet forums, the Durov Code reports.
It contains phone numbers, nicknames and unique identifiers. The exact number of users turned out to be in the public domain is unknown; the database itself occupies about 900 megabytes.
Telegram acknowledged the existence of the base, saying that such information is collected “through abuse of the built-in contact import feature during user registration.
Nevertheless, the messenger team assures that most of the data is already outdated.
“More than 84% of the data was collected before mid-2019. Most of the accounts in this database - at least 60% - contain already irrelevant data. This may indicate that last year we were able to significantly reduce the scale and speed of this type of abuse, ”the Telegram press service said.
According to Telegram estimates, the base consists of almost 70% of data from users from Iran, the remaining 30% from Russia.
In the Telegram channel "Information Leaks" they write that the file "is a compilation from several other databases":
“The basis is the database that was left openly accessible by the marketing agency, which we found in early May, with the addition of 12 million records collected from Russian (+7) phone numbers (this information was collected in April 2020).”
In addition to it, there is also an “Iranian base” Telegram, obtained from an open server of third-party Telegram clients and containing 39 million lines.
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