UPDATE 08/28 5:00 pm EDT Pavel Durov banned from leaving France
In Wednesday’s statement, the Paris prosecutors said Mr Durov was put under formal investigation over alleged offences that included:
- Complicity in the administration of an online platform to enable illicit transactions by an organised gang
- Refusal to communicate with authorities
- Complicity in organised criminal distribution of sexual images of children
In France, being put under formal investigation does not imply guilt or necessarily result in a trial – but it indicates that judges consider there is enough of a case to proceed with an investigation.
From earlier today...
Israel’s attempt to censor the internet? And/or punish the less then compliant? I don’t know but it’s certainly possible.
The news of the Israeli hack broke last week, at the time it was presented as an Iranian hack. It could be? What could tie it to Pavel Durev is that the hacked information was leaked via Telgram as well as other places. But Telegram is specifically cited as being the least cooperative.
Notice the original url? Israel’s futile war against Iranian hack of secret data
Was Durev’s arrest tied to Israel’s war against the hack/hackers and those that provided a platform for the information to be dispersed?
Here’s the report via Archive.ph– The story is still paywalled at Haaretz
A few months ago, foreign hackers managed to break into a computer linked to Israel’s Justice Ministry. Tens of thousands of classified files and sensitive emails were leaked. Links allowing anyone to download the breached files were published on Telegram, the popular instant messaging app.
However, they soon began to disappear. One by one, the hacker’s Telegram channels were taken down, their users deleted and posts that shared the download links gone.
Many of the hackers present themselves as pro-Palestinian forces, but are often fronts for Iran’s semi-official cyber-intelligence hackers. Usually, their goals are to collect information, attack infrastructure and disrupt different services. However, they are also interested in what is termed “perception hacking” and psychological warfare, in this case intended to embarrass Israel, the so-called cyber nation.
Sources say the true extent of the damage to Israel’s security and economy caused by these leaks is not yet fully known, not even to those in charge of dealing with the issue in Israel. They say that despite massive investment in defensive cybersecurity measures, the scale of the leaks is likely the most severe in Israel’s history – “an unprecedented looting of gigabytes upon gigabytes of information of all sorts.”
Local cyber security experts explain that many times, the surfacing of hacked materials is just the public crescendo of a clandestine hack that began some time ago.
After their intelligence value is maxed out, or their operation is caught, the hackers shift gears and begin very loudly trying to publicize the stolen digital goods. Their goal: cause financial and reputational damages to Israel and Israeli firms, especially those who work with the military or state.
In other words, after the hacks come the leaks. Accordingly, once hacked, Israel works to prevent the leak and try to minimize its spread, and thus try to mitigate the long term damage caused by its online existence.
According to a number of people knowledgeable on the matter, Israel is waging a digital war on a number of fronts to try to stem the seemingly endless leak of its information. These efforts include monitoring the web and social media sites for leaks and using legal take-down requests to tech firms like Google, Amazon, Meta and even Telegram, to have them removed or blocked.
and even Telegram
In some cases, the policy proves quite successful. Websites hosted by Western firms have been taken down for providing a home for digital loot flagged by Israeli authorities. Recently, a number of accounts were taken down by Telegram after posting links to hacked materials, including the hackers’ own official channels, but also that of a well-known leaks website that frequently works with journalists and has recently started hosting leaked Israeli data.
The next few paragraphs including the heading…..
Finding Pavel
“From October 7 and continuously since then, up till this very day, we’ve seen a concerted effort of cyber-attacks, some directly linked or attributed to enemy states and terrorist organizations, to conduct ‘perception attacks’ in the form of publishing leaks,” says Haim Wismonsky, the director of the cyber unit in the Israeli State Prosecutor’s Office, which is part of the Justice Ministry and is the body charged with filing the actual requests to tech firms.
“The publication of these leaks is intended to cause a scare, inspire a public panic and create the sense that we are exposed and penetrable, but they are also aimed at causing economic damage if not actually endangering the lives of those people whose personal details are included in their leaks,” Wismonsky explained to Haaretz.
The policy and the way it is deployed makes Israel unique. Many countries, including the U.S., usually take criminal or legal steps against leakers, foreign and local, but will make peace with the leak’s existence online. Israel, on the other hand, uses tech firm’s internal rules to get them to take down the hacked goods on its behalf – and thus prevent the leaked data from reaching the public or journalists, both in Israel and abroad.
Platforms, even those considered hostile to government requests like Telegram, have rules in place intended to defend them against the legal ramifications of their users’ conduct. These can include anything from take down requests due to copyright infringement, or legal claims of libel.
Hacked materials fall under a broad category of stolen goods, so the same policies in place to prevent the spread of files for illegally downloading movies or television series can also be used to take down hacked materials stolen from Israeli servers without consent.
In recent months, for example, Israeli requests flagging violations of Telegram’s terms of use have led to at least 10 takedowns of hacker groups’ users and channels. Many times, it’s the same hacker group who, undeterred, have opened a new channel and posted new links to the same leak.
Telegram has proved a massive challenge for Israel since the start of the war. While many tech firms have streamlined mechanisms through which states can reach out to them, Telegram is considered the least cooperative of them all.
Telegram emerged at the start of the war as a key platform utilized by Hamas’ information warfare against Israel, one Israel was unable to properly address, lacking both monitoring capabilities and an understanding of the platform.
Concerned by the wave of pro-Hamas content, which included videos from the actual attack as well as a constant stream of propaganda materials, Israelis in the high-tech industry tried late in 2023 to reach Telegram’s founder, Pavel Durov.
Though they successfully contacted Durov, who lives in the UAE, he was unreceptive to these private requests to improve moderation on the platform. Though a few pages linked directly to Hamas’ military wing were locally blocked at a later stage, the private initiative failed to gain any real traction with the app’s founder.
Sources explain that Google or Meta will take down a page if it is shown to be directly linked to Hamas and Amazon will remove a website for hosting terrorist materials. On Telegram, content cannot be taken down with such arguments. Only clearly stolen goods will be taken down, making content claims the only effective route for Israel’s legal authorities.
The data speaks for itself: According to official numbers provided by Israel, the Justice Ministry has sent Facebook over 40,000 successful requests to remove “illegal content.“ These are not pro-or-anti-Israel posts, but rather content that is illegal by Western standards. Even TikTok has taken down over 20,000 posts flagged by Israel. On Telegram, that number is just over 1,300.
Being less then cooperative with Israel’s demands to censor the internet might just get you arrested?