It is day 205 of the full-scale war that russia started against our homeland — Ukraine.
Writing this post while air raid sirens are going off.
It was more than a shock. During the first days, we couldn’t gather our thoughts on what to do, where to go, or what to expect. Air raid alerts, sounds of explosions, and missiles literally flying above our heads from time to time did not allow us to concentrate on personal things not to mention our work.
One of the most used applications where Ukrainians read all the news and communicate with each other was Telegram. It still is we have to admit 🙂
We often say that apps with public services will never be safe. But the situation decided everything itself.
As people were “glued” to the app, Telegram servers started to lag. Sometimes, it was hard to read a simple message. Disabling media auto-loading helped a little.
Telegram representatives also tried to handle the situation:
We will continue improving Telegram’s ability to connect people in areas with limited coverage and withstand service disruptions.
Besides Telegram’s instability, the internet and mobile networks were also barely working:
Moreover, Ukrainian services were constantly under russian cyber attacks before and after the war started. As a result, people couldn’t communicate with their loved ones to make sure they were safe.
How our team communicates during the war?
When using public services or applications such as Telegram, we had to make sure about the following things:
- we did not share sensitive information about defenders in case of sudden data leaks or cyberattacks. We never know who manages cloud servers and what their location;
- keeping passwords updated regularly is important. Simple and short combinations are not reliable;
- there must be no suspicious devices logged in under our accounts (Relevant for Telegram).
These measures are the least you can do for cloud services to protect data.
When we were sure that some information did not belong to the public, we used MyChat.
The thing is that having a local private server allows controlling everything from incoming connections to access rights. Moreover, we avoided overloading and lagging.
Also, self-hosted software is not an easy target for hackers simply because it is not public. It takes some time to set it up according to your need, but in the end, you have a reliable and safe connection channel.