Opening the Pandora’s Box of Telegram
Telegram is one of the leading instant messaging platforms available in the market. Many people are shifting from WhatsApp to Signal and Telegram lately. Aesthetically telegram gives an edge over WhatsApp through its UI, funny stickers, bots and so on. Telegram claims to be privacy-friendly, but it’s quite debatable.
Telegram groups have an advantage over WhatsApp groups in terms of member additions. One can also create a channel and share their content. As large amount of data is shared over Telegram everyday, it’s an interesting area for researchers to dig in. So let’s get started.
To start with the basic, Google Dorks can come in handy. Just fire up your browser and type — site:t.me OSINT
As you can see in the above image, some links to OSINT groups popped up.
Moving on, did you know that there is a custom search engine for Telegram that’s based on Google? If you didn’t know — meet Telegogo. Telegogo is pretty detailed that allows you to search for messages, contacts etc.
There is another Telegram search engine that you can take advantage of.
Buzz.im — This allows granular search of messages, channels, authors etc.
Now let’s move on to the world of bots. Bots are not humans, they are software. Just like that! There are lot of Telegram bots at your service, from fetching you news articles to playing chess. So let’s see some cool bots which can help you as a researcher.
- SangMataInfo_bot — This helps you to identify username history based on unique identifier.
- userinfobot — This gives you user id and other details.
So there are many other bots that are useful and I’ll leave that to you to discover :). Two caveats here, first, sometimes the bots might not work or stop abruptly, don’t get frustrated at times like that, search for alternatives. Second, beware of the legal aspects based on your region and work when you are looking for bots such as passwordsearchbot.
You can increase your knowledge here — https://github.com/ItIsMeCall911/Awesome-Telegram-OSINT
That’s all for this time, keep digging.
