Report: Russia says terrorists used encrypted messaging service Telegram to coordinate attack

Russia’s FSB intelligence service said Monday that terrorists have used encrypted-messaging service Telegram to plan attacks, according to Reuters.

The attacks planned on Telegram allegedly include the April bombing in St. Petersburg that killed 15 people. 

Last week, Roskomnadzor, the country’s communications regulator, threatened to block Telegram unless it handed over information about its parent company.

{mosads}And on Monday, the FSB said in a statement, according to Reuters’ translation, that the service had provided “terrorists with the opportunity to create secret chat rooms with a high degree of encryption.”

The agency also said that the suicide bomber who killed 15 people on the St. Petersburg metro in April had used Telegram to coordinate the attack with his accomplices.

Writing on social media, Telegram founder Pavel Durov said that the FSB had demanded that the company give Russian intelligence a backdoor to decrypt terrorists’ messages.

“If you want to defeat terrorism by blocking stuff, you’ll have to block the internet,” Durov wrote.

While the FSB alleges that Telegram is used by terrorists, Telegram is also popular with political activists and dissidents in Russia for its security features.