Tapping the OSINT potential of Telegram

This short talk explores the intelligence potential available in the Telegram messaging app, with particular focus on our novel work exploring its new “similar channels” feature. Telegram is a popular application with numerous, but labyrinthine, security settings and many ways to spill data. In November 2023, Telegram also launched a new “similar channels” recommender feature, explaining that upon joining a channel, users will be shown similar channels that were "selected automatically based on similarities in their subscriber bases.” We built a new tool, which we will release at DEFCON, to collect and analyze this similar channels data. We will then show how to use social network analysis techniques to uncover previously-hidden relationships between channels on the platform. In the course of collecting this OSINT for our own research projects, we uncovered evidence of numerous inauthentic channel networks that are being used to influence political discourse.