Russia accidentally blocked access to over 16 million IP addresses this week in an attempt to crack down on messaging app Telegram for refusing to decrypt its users’ chats, The Daily Beast reports.
Telegram, one of the most popular messaging services in Russia, is unique in its use of "channels," which users can subscribe to and see content ranging from political commentary, leaks and rumors, and even two channels allegedly run by members of Russia’s "troll factory" in St. Petersburg. Parliament members, government ministers and top level Russian officials, such as President Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov and Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova, frequently used the platform.
Telegram recently became embroiled in a legal battle with Russia’s state media watchdog Roskomnadzor over its refusal to remove encryption from its service. The agency initially demanded that Telegram grant authorities access to users’ chats, which the company said was impossible since the chats are encrypted on the users’ devices. The government then told Telegram to rewrite the app to allow access to the chats, which the company refused to do. Last Friday, a Russian court ruled against Telegram, prompting Roskomnadzor to order ISPs to block access to IP addresses that use Telegram.
However, Telegram connects users via cloud services from Amazon and Google, which are used by many other websites, companies and government organizations. In trying to block Telegram’s users, Roskomnadzor ended up blocking millions of addresses that were completely unaffiliated with Telegram. State video news agency Ruptly, a part of RT, went offline just as Roskomnadzor’s director, Alexander Zharov, was telling the network in an interview that no "socially relevant resources," were hit by the ban, according to Russian journalist Alexey Kovalev, writing in The Washington Post.
"Watching this debacle, many Russians are wondering: How is it possible that a country accused of waging sophisticated cyberwarfare campaigns around the world is so utterly incompetent in domestic tech affairs," Kovalev asks. "There is now a theory circulating on Russian Facebook that the ban was deliberately botched so as to create exactly this kind of plausible deniability. Like most conspiracy theories, it’s far-fetched but illustrative: People would rather believe in sabotage than state-sponsored incompetence so gross that it threatens the country’s own IT backbone."
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