- Confidential and Proprietary - Luminar Annual Threat Landscape Report Page 20 5 Trend Analysis Several of our peers have previously published series of research on the matter: In January 2022 Cybersixgill published a series of article on the use of Telegram by cybercriminals 48 ; In November 2022, Positive Technologies investigate a set of cybercrime related groups and analyzed their activities 49 ; In early February 2023, Kela issued its own report on the subject. 50 While these reports provide an insightful outlook on the range of activities taking place in Telegram groups, we shall focus on a bird’s- eye view, delving into the numbers while attempting to point out macro-level trends. To reach that goal we have used a dataset of about 4 billion Telegram messages from various Telegram cyber-related channels and groups. As seen in the Graph 1 below from 2016, there was a surge in the number of Telegram cyber-related messages. Graph 1 – The rise in the number of cyber-related messages in Telegram over the years Comparing the above stats with the number of posts published on the Dark Web shows us a clear trend. As seen in Graph 2, until mid-2019, Dark Web surpassed Telegram by a significant margin. However, since mid-2019, we have witnessed a continuous surge in the number of Telegram messages, while spotting a decline in the number of Dark Web posts. This trend is even more pronounced when considering our collection capabilities and limitations – considering the vast amount of data shared on Telegram, we can determine with certainty that the Telegram messages collected for this research is lower than the actual cyber-related messages out there. Yet on the Dark Web, our collection is more comprehensive and covers a much larger share of the total data. The 48 https://news.cybersixgill.com/telegram-a-cybercriminal-hotspot-compromised-financial-accounts/ 49 https://www.ptsecurity.com/ww-en/analytics/cybercriminal-market-in-telegram/ 50 https://ke-la.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/KELA_Telegram_CEBIN.pdf