International volunteers are being recruited to carry out cyberattacks against Russia. Mykhailo Fedorov, the country's digital transformation minister, announced on Saturday that he was assembling an IT army on Telegram. The channel has more than 25,000 subscribers. The New York Times translated a post from the Ukrainian government into English. The country calls on people to report pro-Russian channels on the internet in hopes of getting them removed from the internet. Russia Today and other Kremlin-affiliated channels were temporarily barred from earning ad revenue on the platform as a result of that call to action. The call for volunteers came after Anonymous took down multiple Russian government websites. Telegram is the most popular messenger in urban Ukraine. After a decade of misleading marketing and press, most ppl there believe it’s an “encrypted app” The reality is the opposite-TG is by default a cloud database w/ a plaintext copy of every msg everyone has ever sent/recvd. https://t.co/6eRGIyXyje
The choice to manage the effort on Telegram could hurt the country in the long run. The founder of Signal points out that Telegram isn't as secure as people think. Unless you enable its Secret chat feature, your conversations aren't end-to-end encrypted, which means the company can unlock most messages at any time. In the current situation, that is a problem because Telegram employees have family in Russia, and there is a possibility that the government could exploit that fact.
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