How Sessions was born

Years of watching it happen

We did not come to this from security. We came to it from money. For years, a group of us built in crypto and fintech: on-ramps and off-ramps, payment rails, the infrastructure that moves real value between the old financial world and the new one. That work happens on Telegram. Founders, traders, market makers, communities, deals: it all lives there.

Which means we also had a front-row seat to what goes wrong there. Every few months, someone we knew would lose their account. Not a password forgotten. Taken. One day they were fine, the next day scam links were going out in their name, their community was being drained, and their contacts were being hit by messages that looked exactly like them. We spent a lot of late nights helping friends try to claw an account back, and learning, every time, how little could actually be done once it was gone.

Then it stopped being occasional

For a long time this felt like bad luck that struck once in a while. Over the last couple of years it stopped feeling like luck. It became a wave.

The numbers are ugly and getting worse: hundreds of millions of dollars in reported Telegram-related fraud, billions of leaked credentials floating through forums, and a sharp rise in malware that quietly copies your logged-in session straight off your computer. That last part is the one almost nobody understands. The most effective takeovers now do not need your password or your login code at all. They steal the session itself, and to Telegram the attacker simply looks like you. No new-login warning ever fires. We wrote about exactly how that works in our breakdown of a stolen-session replay.

When the people getting hit went from unlucky friends to a steady stream of capable, careful people who did everything right, it was obvious this was not a user-education problem. The attack had simply outgrown the defenses.

Why nothing actually stopped it

Here is what bothered us most. When it happens, you are mostly on your own. Telegram hands you a list of devices and a button, and expects you to notice the intruder and beat them to it, by hand, in the middle of your day. We have written about why that terminate button so often fails: the stolen session looks identical to yours, a 24-hour rule can lock you out of acting, and the malware just steals the next session you create.

The other thing you find, the moment you go looking for help, is that the space is full of predators. Search for how to recover a hacked account and you land in a swamp of fake recovery services, hackers for hire, and fund-recovery firms that are simply the second scam. People who are already victims get hunted a second time. We hated that. A category this important should not be owned by the people circling the wounded.

So we built the guard we wished existed

Sessions is the answer we wanted to be able to hand a friend. It watches your Telegram around the clock and removes any session that is not you, the moment it appears, automatically. It does not wait for you to notice. It looks for the fingerprints a takeover cannot hide, like your account being driven live from two places at once, and it ends the attacker's session in real time.

We built it the way people with our background would want it built. It is non-custodial: we never take control of your account or your funds. It runs in sealed, attested hardware whose open-source code provably cannot read your messages, and you can verify that yourself rather than take our word for it. And you can revoke it at any time. The defense should never become a new thing you have to trust blindly. That principle is the whole point.

Why we write here

This blog is the other half of the job. The reason these attacks keep working is that the truth about them is buried under listicles written by people who have never seen one up close. So we are going to write it down plainly: how the attacks actually work, what the honest options are when you have been hit, and what genuinely prevents the next one. No fear-selling, no pretending recovery is easy when it is not, no resemblance to the recovery scams. Just what we know, updated as we learn more.

If you build in crypto or run a community on Telegram, this is your threat model whether you have thought about it or not. We would rather you hear it from us before it happens than find us afterward.

If you want to talk, reach out. You can find me and the team on the contact page, including my LinkedIn. We answer.