13 February 2018, 13:34 / Technologies

Kaspersky Lab discovered a vulnerability in Telegram

Russian-speaking hackers could have used it Pavel Kantyshev

Kaspersky Lab discovered a vulnerability in Telegram / Evgeniy Razumny / Vedomosti

Kaspersky Lab has discovered a vulnerability in the Telegram messenger. We are talking about a messenger client for the Windows operating system, a vulnerability in which allowed attackers to gain remote access to the victim’s computer and also use it to mine the cryptocurrencies Monero, ZCash and Fantomcoin, Kaspersky Lab said in a statement.

The company assumes that the attackers are of Russian-speaking origin. They have been exploiting the vulnerability since at least March 2017. On their servers, Kaspersky Lab discovered encrypted parts of user correspondence: documents, audio and video recordings, photographs.

In total, about 1,000 Telegram users were affected by the vulnerability, and all of them were from Russia, said Laboratory antivirus expert Alexey Firsh. Victims downloaded malicious software disguised as harmless files. It was possible to disguise them using a special right-to-left override attack - a special computer encoding character used in working with languages where the text runs from right to left (for example, Arabic or Hebrew). Using this symbol, attackers changed the extension of files that were opened by an unsuspecting user, explains Kaspersky Lab.

The antivirus company told Telegram about the vulnerability, and it has now been fixed.

Vedomosti is expecting a comment from Telegram founder Pavel Durov.