Quote:Telegram users who specifically utilize the application for its anonymity features are advised to update their desktop clients as soon as possible to patch a bug that will leak their IP address in some scenarios.

The bug was found by Dhiraj Mishra, a bug hunter from Mumbai, India, and was patched by Telegram with the releases of Telegram for Desktop v1.4.0 and v1.3.17 beta.

Mishra told ZDNet that he discovered that under certain conditions, the Telegram desktop clients for Windows, Mac, and Linux would reveal users' IP address, even when the client was configured to protect this information.

The leak, Mishra said, happened only during voice calls, and occurred even when the "Peer-to-Peer" connection type option was set to "Nobody." This is a big deal, as this option is intended to mask the IP addresses of the two users calling each other.

Under normal circumstances, Telegram's voice calling feature works by establishing a direct IP-to-IP (or peer-to-peer) connection between the two users, and exchanging data packets between the two directly.