Expert: Telegram blocking may take month, still stay incomplete

MOSCOW, Apr 13 (PRIME) -- Russia will find it rather difficult to technically block popular messenger Telegram on its territory, and the process could take a month, but will be incomplete all the same, head of the Cybersecurity Agency Yevgeny Lifshits told PRIME on Friday.

“The Cybersecurity Agency is waiting how Telegram’s blocking will take place from the technical point of view. We repeatedly said that it is not easy. They will close ports during a lengthy period of time: don’t be in a hurry with proxy and socks. Technically, all operators must be said which ports, addresses of servers to close. It’s hard, it will take about a month,” Lifshits said.

The communications service, which won a court case to block Telegram in Russia, must inform PlayMarket and Apple Store of the necessity of removing the application for Russian users.

Lifshits reminded of the situation with professional network LinkedIn, which is also muted in Russia. “They closed it as a website, easier to close an address. Operators added the website to the list of banned resources. With Telegram, it’s more complicated, there are ports and IP addresses. If ports are floating, I don’t know which ports Telegram has, it could have own software, meaning that it will be hard to block precise addresses and ports,” he said.

The communications service will find it almost impossible to ban socks, virtual private networks (VPN), other anonymizers, which attribute IP addresses of third countries to users.

“So it’s impossible to technically ban Telegram fully for Russian users. They can limit access to it and ban users from exploiting it, but it’s impossible to forbid it fully,” Lifshits said.

A spokesperson for antivirus software maker Kaspersky Lab said that the use of proved VPN services does not bring risks of data leak, but protects people from such consequences.

“The main task of VPN is to ensure through data encoding safe connection via the Internet between the user and a certain zone of the network,” the spokesperson said.

The VPN technology can be vulnerable as well, and users should better exploit solutions of proved producers.

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