Risky Bulletin Risky Bulletin: Russia starts criminal probe of Telegram founder Pavel Durov
Feb 25, 2026
Russian authorities opening a criminal investigation into Telegram's founder makes headlines. Teen hackers tied to a South Korean bike-share breach were arrested. Allegations surface that firms scraped and distilled an AI maker's outputs. Major hacks and sanctions ripple through crypto, ISPs, healthcare platforms and exploit brokers.
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Russia Accuses Telegram Founder Of Enabling Violence
- Russian authorities opened a criminal probe accusing Pavel Durov of facilitating terrorist activity on Telegram.
- The FSB cited uses like organising school shootings, harassing military families and recruiting spies while Russia already throttled voice calls and messaging.
Teen Hackers Learned On Telegram Then Hit Bike Share
- Two high school students in South Korea were arrested for breaching bike share service Tarungi and stealing data on 4.6 million users.
- The suspects met on Telegram and learned about cybersecurity as they executed the June 2024 hack that was discovered this year.
AI Firms Accused Of Mass Distillation Attacks On Claude
- Anthropic alleges three Chinese AI firms ran distillation attacks by creating over 24,000 Claude accounts to scrape its model output.
- The firms DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and Minimax used millions of queries to train their models on Claude's responses.