According to TapTechNews on June 25, Pavel Duvrov, the founder of Telegram, disclosed that the entire company has only 30 engineers and has no human resources (HR) department. He believes that this is not a problem because the team is "super efficient".
However, security experts are not optimistic about Telegram, as they do not default to enabling end-to-end encryption (users can enable it manually), use an exclusive encryption algorithm, and their servers are located in the United Arab Emirates (TapTechNews note: Telegram is headquartered in Dubai). They think Telegram is difficult to effectively combat hackers.
Matthew Green, a cryptography expert at Johns Hopkins University, said in an interview with TechCrunch, "No end-to-end encryption, a large number of vulnerable targets, and servers located in the United Arab Emirates? This sounds like a security nightmare."
Eva Galperin, the director of network security at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), pointed out that this will only stimulate cyber attackers. "...If I were a hacker, I would definitely think this is good news. Every attacker loves that the opponent has a serious shortage of manpower and is overworked."
In addition, 30 engineers may be able to maintain operations, but they are not good at running other businesses. "'30 engineers' means that there is no one to handle legal requests and there is no infrastructure to handle abuse and content review issues," Galperin said.