Telegram 2020

In early 2020 a massive database containing information on approximately 42 million Telegram users was exposed online. The data was primarily harvested from Iranian users through an unsecured Elasticsearch cluster. The incident was attributed to unauthorized third party forks of the Telegram application which are common in regions where the official app faces restrictions. The leaked records included sensitive account identifiers and associated contact details. Telegram representatives clarified that the data was scraped using the contact import feature rather than a direct breach of their core servers. The exposure highlighted the risks associated with using unofficial client applications and the potential for large scale automated data harvesting via built in platform features.