Identification of Telegram users

2022: Service Launch

In mid-August 2022, it became known about the creation of a service in Russia that finds Telegram users by IP address. This is a joint project of Internet Search and T.Hunter.

As the head of the Internet Search company Igor Bederov told Runet.News, in one second there can be up to a hundred users on one IP address. To identify one of them, you need to weed out unnecessary information, for example, other regions, data from the end devices from which it goes to the Network, information about the operating system and which site it went to.

According to Bederov, most sites store logs, that is, they see data about the user's device, his connection, IP address, and so on. Today, 64 different data sources are connected to the service for searching for a person's Telegram account via IP.

To search for people, they receive information from several dozen "own sites," and also collect digital traces from Telegram with a link to the user for more than a year, explained Vladimir Makarov, an OSINT researcher at T.Hunter. Thus, their service has data on more than 6 million people. And by entering an IP address in their search system, you can find a specific person.

It remains only to compare one with another, - summed up Igor Bederov.

On the website of the Internet Search company, Bederov also said that back in October 2018, he created a service that allows identifying messenger users in such parameters as: phone number, digital fingerprint and geolocation. At the beginning of 2022, he released the 3rd edition of the methodology for identifying Telegram channels and chats.

According to MediaScope, by June 2022, there are about 20.7 million Telegram users in Russia.^[1]

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