Category Archives: Security

CIA Telegram Campaign Breach: How Russian Intelligence Exploits Attestation Weaknesses

The presence of intelligence agencies on commercial app platforms like Telegram creates multi-faceted security vulnerabilities that highlight the integrity-era of breach risks

Attestation Weaknesses

The core problem with verifying authentic identity on an app like Telegram is structural. The platform providing the app lacks robust verification mechanisms for at least two reasons:

  1. Platform Design
    • Access and growth prioritized over identity strength
    • Attestation relies primarily on usernames, profile pictures, and channel descriptions—known weak and easily spoofable elements
    • No cryptographic chain-of-trust or certificate hierarchy exists to verify official accounts
  2. Platform Vulns
    • Even when official channels use verification badges, these visual indicators are trivial to mimic visually in profile images
    • Domain-based verification (linking to external sites) can be circumvented by setting up look-alike domains, as seen in a newly reported rusvolcorps[.]net case

Real-World Danger

The risk is not theoretical, as tangible dangers have already manifested in some obvious ways.

Russian citizens opposing the war, providing personal information to FSB-operated honeypots can lead to imprisonment (decades of incarceration and likely death). Military personnel seeking surrender options via the “I want to live” hotline (Hochuzhit), could lead to physical harm or death if their surrender plans are exposed.

The CIA’s Telegram presence clearly aims to gather intelligence despite restricted media access in Russia. When their channel is compromised, it sets up a “counter-intelligence funnel” where attempts to share information are intercepted instead. This compromises both the source and the intelligence itself.

Systemic Vulnerabilities in Web 2.0

While “just an app” has been said for years to claim limited risk, the reality has become far more complex.

  1. Interoperable Data Flows:
    • Information collected from phishing campaigns doesn’t stay on an app; it feeds broader intelligence operations
    • Collected data enables wider physical and digital targeting
    • Information asymmetry gives Russian intelligence precise knowledge of who to target in anti-regime movements
  2. OpSec Failure:
    • Impersonations destroy security protocols for legitimate organizations operating in hostile environments
    • Typical security advice (“check official channels”) becomes circular when the verification process itself is compromised
    • Traditional “out-of-band” verification becomes nearly impossible in closed information environments

The strategic implications of this asymmetric information warfare is Russian intelligence services are exploiting the CIA’s presence on Telegram. A documented counter-intelligence campaign demonstrates Russian tactical exploitation of foreign outreach efforts. Their operation blends technical, social, and psychological techniques.

Such operations create lasting distrust in legitimate communication channels. CIA operations opened the door to increased skepticism from potential sources. Honeypot tactics instead created a “poisoned well” effect for intelligence gathering.

Basic and usual mitigations are going to be insufficient. Simple domain verification fails (demonstrated in nearly identical domains). Public warnings about fake domains have had only limited reach (e.g., Legion Liberty’s Twitter warning). Traditional “check the URL” advice doesn’t work with seasoned impersonations.

The immediate change needed is for intelligence agencies to embrace platform-specific verification protocols beyond what Telegram offers. Asymmetric cryptography, for example, still provides suitable verification for sensitive communications (setting aside quantum). An integrated multi-channel verification model should decouple communication safety from any single platform’s own security model.

The latest Russian phishing campaigns represent a military intelligence operation with real-world consequences far beyond basic security concerns. The related attestation weaknesses aren’t merely technical flaws but writing on the wall about all of our future needs; protection from strategic vulnerabilities exploited in an information warfare context.

As critical communications increasingly flow through commercial platforms never designed to prevent integrity breaches, organizations must develop frameworks that function independently of platform limitations. This case study of intelligence agencies on Telegram reveals not just a specific vulnerability, but a preview of widespread authentication challenges facing governments, financial institutions, and critical infrastructure. The exposure of identity attestation attacks transcends intelligence operations, signifying a broader security paradigm shift.

We’re in the age of “integrous” data needs.

Without reimagining how we establish trust in digital channels, a shift to Web 3.0, we risk building increasingly complex systems on fundamentally unreliable foundations – a structural integrity vulnerability no privacy firewall can mitigate.

Tesla is Toast: UK Bans FSD, China Cancels After a Week

The world is done with Elon Musk. His lies only are getting any audience in America, where his shell games are hollowing out a corrupted government.

…it is not even close to offering full self driving capability, a fact that has convinced the Department for Transport (DfT) in the UK to disallow most Tesla driver-assist features… If you told those people they had to stand over their toasters and monitor them constantly to prevent the toast from burning, they would think you were a perfect jackass.

Both the UK and China just rejected Tesla designs and engineering as below baseline safety requirements. It is easy for any engineer to see why:

Historical data from 2013-2023 | Projections for 2024-2026. Linear projection reaches ~65 incidents by 2026 | Exponential projection reaches ~95 incidents by 2026. Source: tesla-fire.com

A Cursor -y Warning: How a MIT Math Whiz Failed Privacy 101

Arvid Lunnemark, one of the 2022 MIT mathematics graduates behind the Cursor product that may be looking at all your code, in 2021 wrote about achieving “complete privacy” through cryptographic means. Looking at his published engineering principles reveals exactly why his approach to privacy is so concerning:

1. Deal with the mess.
2. Let different things be different.
3. Always use UUIDs.
4. Delay serialization.
5. Look at things.
6. Never name something `end`. Always either `endExclusive` or `endInclusive`.
7. When a method is dangerous to call, add `_DANGEROUS_DANGEROUS_DANGEROUS_BECAUSE_XYZ` to its name…
8. Good tools are critical… If there isn’t a good tool, make one.

This reads like an inexperienced life answer to happiness. It’s the least compelling answer to privacy: clean, organized, tool-focused, and utterly disconnected from reality of real world communication.

The tone is reminiscent of Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” where the supercomputer Deep Thought calculates the answer to life, the universe, and everything as simply “42“—technically “correct” and yet so obviously fundamentally useless without understanding the question.

Douglas Adams sits next to the answer to life, the universe and everything.

Lunnemark’s approach to privacy openly and proudly embodies this same catastrophic mistake everyone has been warned for decades to understand (hey, he was still a student, stretching his wings, hoping to start a revolution).

His principles show a mindset being taught or schooled that complex problems are to be reduced to technical solutions by building the “right” tools and labeling dangers “explicitly” enough. This isn’t just naive—it’s potentially harmful in tautological fallacies.

Privacy with better UUIDs or cleaner method names is like a bank vault with cleaner threads on its screws. Revolutionary? Pun intended, but not really. Safety from loss of privacy exists within centuries-old power struggles between individuals, economic or social groups, and states. It operates within power systems that incentivize imbalance for reasons well known. It functions very, very differently across cultural and political contexts.

When someone who graduates from MIT in 2022 proclaims the year before that they’ve found the answer to privacy through better cryptography, they’re giving us their “42”—a solution to a problem they haven’t properly understood.

Such technical reductionism has real consequences. The whistleblower who trusts in “complete privacy” might face legal jeopardy no cryptography can prevent. The activist who believes their communications are “cryptographically completely private” might not anticipate physical surveillance, economic coercion, or infamously documented rubber-hose cryptanalysis.

Source: https://xkcd.com/538/

The inexperienced quick-fix engineering mindset that treats privacy as primarily a technical problem is dangerous because it creates false security. It promises certainty in a domain where there is none, only trade-offs and calculated risks. It substitutes a fetish of mathematical proofs for proper sociopolitical understanding. You want more message confidentiality? You just lost some availability. You want more message integrity? You just lost some confidentiality.

History repeatedly shows that technical absolutism fails. In fact, I like to ask computer science graduate students to read about neo-absolutist secret services (meant to preserve elitist power) for a great example of important history overlooked (because there’s 100% certainty they’ve never heard of it before, despite direct relevance to our challenges today).

…the regime rested on the support of a standing army of soldiers, a kneeling army of worshippers, and a crawling army of informants was exaggerated but not entirely unfounded.

The German Enigma machine notably was undermined 10 years before WWII by Polish mathematicians because they understood and exploited weak supply chains and other human measures. PGP encryption has been theoretically secure while practically abused for being unusable because who has invested in the real issues? End-to-end encryption protects message content but still leaks metadata—as Lunnemark correctly identifies—but his solution falls into the same trap of believing the next technical iteration will be the first one to “solve” privacy.

Young engineers aren’t wrong to build better privacy tools—we desperately need better things. They’re better! But they need to approach measuring concepts of “better” with humility and interdisciplinary understanding. What’s good for one may be bad for many, good for many bad for one. Engineers in other disciplines have to sign a code of ethics, yet a computer engineer has none. They need to recognize that they’re not the first to think deeply about problems like privacy, and that philosophers, historians, economists, and political scientists have insights that algorithms alone cannot provide.

Key management is much more interesting as a problem of social science than the mathematical properties of “better” material for making locks strong, or even those revolutionary finer threads on a vault screw.

The answer to privacy isn’t 42, and it isn’t “complete cryptographic privacy” either. It’s a complex, evolving negotiation that requires technical innovation alongside deep understanding of human systems. Until our bright young minds grasp this, they risk creating even worse problems rather than real solutions.

Honestly, I’d rather be riding a mechanical horse than driving a car because legs are “better” than wheels in so many ways I’ve lost count. The “automobile” rush that pushed everyone and everything off roads has been a devastatingly terrible idea, inferior in most ways to transportation much older. Those promoting the “king’s carriage” mentality often turn out to be aspiring kings, rather than solving problems to make transit “better” for anyone but themselves.


Since we’re in the world of agentic innovation, and I suspect a 2021 MIT student blog post never saw much interdisciplinary review, here’s a fictional “what would they say” thought exercise:

  • Elinor Ostrom: “Lunnemark’s proposal demonstrates the danger of assuming universal solutions to complex governance problems. Privacy is not merely a technical problem but a common-pool resource that different communities manage according to their specific needs and contexts. It ignores polycentric systems through which privacy is negotiated in different social and political environments. Such a cryptographic approach imposed from above would likely undermine the diverse institutional arrangements through which communities actually protect their information commons. Effective privacy protection emerges from nested, contextual systems of governance—not from mathematical proofs developed in isolation from the communities they purport to serve.
  • Hannah Arendt: “Lunnemark has mistaken a problem for a technical solution instead of a political one. Privacy is the precondition for political action, beyond the curation of an investigation’s authority. When he speaks of ‘complete privacy’ through cryptographic means, he betrays a profound misunderstanding of how power operates. Privacy exists in the realm of unruly human affairs, not in rules of math. The rush into ‘cryptographically complete privacy’ would be the illusion of protection while doing nothing to address the fundamental power relationships that determine who can act freely in the public sphere. Technical shields without political foundations are mere fantasies that distract from the real work of securing human freedom.”
  • Michel Foucault: “How fascinating to see power’s newest disguise. This discourse of ‘complete privacy’ merely gives authority a new look, obscuring their unnatural role expanded. The author believes he can escape the panopticon through mathematical means, yet fails to see how this very belief is produced by the systems of privileged knowledge that determine what ‘privacy’ means in our epoch. His solution doesn’t challenge surveillance—it normalizes it by accepting its terms. True resistance requires not better cryptography but questioning the entire apparatus that makes privacy something we must ‘solve’ rather than a condition we demand. His technical solution doesn’t escape power; it merely reconfigures how power is exercised to likely benefit the shovel manufacturer in a graveyard.”
  • Max Weber: “Lunnemark’s cryptographic solution reveals the iron cage of technical rationality at its most seductive. By reducing privacy to a mathematical problem, he exemplifies the disenchantment of the modern world—where substantive questions of human dignity and social relations are subordinated to formal, calculable procedures. This represents not progress, but the triumph of bureaucratic thinking over meaningful action. True privacy cannot be secured through technical efficiency alone, but requires legitimate authority grounded in social understanding. His approach mistakes the rationalization of means for the clarification of ends, creating an illusion of control while leaving the fundamental questions of power, surveillance, and human autonomy unaddressed. This is precisely the danger I warned of—when technical expertise becomes divorced from value-rational deliberation about the ends it ought to serve.”

Can you spot the mathematician? We need to find and fight against not just one specific ungrounded proposal such as Lunnemark’s, but the entire mindset of technical solutionism whenever it creeps into technology circles that operate without any code of ethics.