⭐ Official THN Telegram Channel — A trusted, widely read, independent source for breaking news and tech coverage about cybersecurity and hacking.
📨 Contact: [email protected]
🌐 Website: https://thehackernews.com
Created
17 October 2015 — measured — cross-checked against a third-party dataset (ext.tg_channel)
Hacking & security — a classification, not a measurement. An on-box language model (Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-UD-Q6_K_XL, prompt version 1) read this channel’s own recent posts on 8 August 2026 and assigned it the closest of 31 fixed categories, at 97% confidence. This is a model’s judgement about what the channel is likely to be about, not a fact this register measured the way a subscriber count or a view count is measured — it can be revised on a later pass, and it carries no weight anywhere else on this page. How this classification works, and why it has no browse page of its own yet.
Growth
38 measurements spanning 59 days, net +1,577. Dots are measurements; the straight line between them is drawn to join them, not to claim we know the path taken in between — snapshots are recorded only when a count changes, so gaps mean “no change observed”, never “interpolated”. The vertical axis spans 161,617–165,274 and does not start at zero.
Measurement log — every subscribers count we have recorded, most recent 20 of 38
Measured (UTC)
Subscribers
Change
3 Oct 2026, 19:35
163,733
-422
25 Sept 2026, 01:58
164,155
-510
18 Sept 2026, 21:17
164,665
-187
16 Sept 2026, 13:55
164,852
+2,593
14 Sept 2026, 19:56
162,259
-55
13 Sept 2026, 03:19
162,314
-29
11 Sept 2026, 04:39
162,343
+54
8 Sept 2026, 07:36
162,289
+42
5 Sept 2026, 01:20
162,247
+35
3 Sept 2026, 10:15
162,212
-9
2 Sept 2026, 02:44
162,221
-14
1 Sept 2026, 03:44
162,235
-41
31 Aug 2026, 05:54
162,276
+16
30 Aug 2026, 05:43
162,260
-27
29 Aug 2026, 02:04
162,287
+16
28 Aug 2026, 00:03
162,271
+24
27 Aug 2026, 01:03
162,247
+45
26 Aug 2026, 01:54
162,202
+11
25 Aug 2026, 00:43
162,191
+12
23 Aug 2026, 13:23
162,179
first reading
Engagement
546 posts held, back to 4 August 2026 — the reader has not yet reached the start of this channel’s public history, so older posts may sit further back, unread. Read across 126 pages of Telegram’s post history, 20 posts per page.
ERR · 30 days
3.28%
avg views ÷ 163,733 subscribers
Avg views / post
5,370
271 posts measured
Reaction rate
0.165%
reactions ÷ views · ER floor
Posts in window
271
of 546 held
ERR is average views per post over the last 30 days divided by subscribers, the definition TGStat uses, so this figure is comparable with the one you will see elsewhere. It falls structurally as a channel grows: a high ERR on a small channel and a low one on a large channel describe reach mathematics, not quality. We publish the figure and the sample it came from and pass no verdict on it.
ER is defined industry-wide as (forwards + reactions + comments) ÷ views — note the denominator is views, not subscribers. Telegram’s public web preview carries views and reactions but not forward or comment counts, so the reaction rate above is the reactions term only and is therefore a floor: the true ER for this channel is higher by an amount we have not measured and will not estimate. It is computed over the 265 of 271 measured posts that carry a reaction reading, and over those same posts' views.
What these figures were computed from
Window
Rolling 30 days · latest post in window 6 October 2026
Posts held
546 (4 August 2026 – 6 October 2026)
Views total
1,456,400
Reactions total
2,363
Forwards / comments
not exposed by the public surface — not measured, not estimated
Readings taken
6 Oct 2026, 22:20 UTC
Views are a single reading per post, taken at the time above. A post published in the last day or two is still accumulating views, which pulls the 30-day average down slightly. That is a property of the standard definition rather than a fault in it, so we keep the definition rather than “correcting” the number into something nobody can reproduce.
Precision. Telegram publishes view counts on its public widget in short form — 8.12K, 3.7M — so any reading at or above 1,000 reaches us rounded to three significant figures, and only counts below 1,000 are exact. Averages and rates derived from them are shown to the same precision rather than to the unit: a figure like 3,701,250 would assert digits nobody measured.
Reaction counts are published per emoji and rounded the same way, so a total below 1,000 is exact and a larger one is a sum that may carry a rounded component from each emoji above 1,000. Because it is a sum, it does not look rounded — read a large reaction total as three significant figures per contributing emoji rather than as the figure it prints.
What this channel posts
Photos
≈4,100
Videos
≈28
Links
≈10,100
Lifetime counters from Telegram’s own channel header, read 6 October 2026 — not the date at the top of this page, which is when the subscriber count was last read. A count marked ≈ was rounded by Telegram before we ever saw it — t.me prints these counters in full below 1,000 and to three significant figures above, so ≈142,000 means somewhere between 141,500 and 142,499.
Video runtime
5m 00s
Average length
50s
Measured directly from 6 videos with a duration reading, out of the posts we hold for this channel — not this channel’s whole posting history, only the sample this register has actually read. An exact reading to the second, taken from the post itself rather than from Telegram’s own rounded chrome, so it carries no ≈ mark.
Reaction mix
5,326 reactions across 519 posts, in 8 distinct kinds. The most used accounts for 33.7% of them.
Every reaction kind recorded on the sample, most used first
Reaction
Count
Share
Share, drawn
🔥
1,796
33.7%
😁
1,081
20.3%
👍
693
13.0%
🤯
488
9.16%
👏
380
7.13%
🤔
341
6.40%
⚡
332
6.23%
😱
215
4.04%
No sentiment is inferred, and none should be read in. This table is ordered by count and by nothing else. Emoji do not carry stable meaning across languages or communities — 🙏 is thanks in one channel and mourning in another — so we publish which ones were pressed and how often, and pass no judgement on what an audience meant by them.
Precision. Telegram publishes reaction counts per emoji and short-forms each one — 4.34K, 1.2M — so any single kind at or above 1,000 reaches us at three significant figures, and only counts below 1,000 are exact. The shares above are ratios of those figures and carry the same error. This is also why the total here can differ slightly from a reaction total printed elsewhere on the page: both are sums of the same rounded parts, taken over samples with different edges.
Coverage. Reactions were read on 539 of the 546 sampled posts in this sample. Summed by Telegram’s own count on each post — not by adding up the per-emoji breakdown above — those same posts carry 5,564 reactions in total: the kind of figure the paragraph above means by “a reaction total printed elsewhere on the page”.
Measured over the 546 most recent posts we hold, published 4 August 2026 to 6 October 2026, using the newest reading held for each. Telegram Stars are excluded: they are a payment, not a reaction, and they have their own section.
⚠️ Linux backdoors are hiding behind trusted email security names.
Rapid7 found BPFDoor, BPF Rekoobe, and AVERAT targeting systems in South Korea and Taiwan, impersonating products and processes to blend in. AVERAT even uses SMTP for C2.
Read: https://thehackernews.com/2026/10/linux-backdoors-impersonate-email.html
Get an inside look at Georgetown's Cybersecurity Master's program. Register for the virtual sample class on October 15.
Sign up → https://thn.news/sample-class-risk
‼️ Opening a malicious spreadsheet can make LibreOffice or OpenOffice run attacker-controlled code without a macro warning.
The attack requires Java to be enabled. LibreOffice has patched the flaw; OpenOffice 4.1.16 remains affected.
PoC demonstrated, details here - https://thehackernews.com/2026/10/libreoffice-and-openoffice-flaws-let.html
Can you keep up with SaaS sprawl?
As applications multiply, so do users, permissions, access policies, and the places IT needs visibility. Without a centralized approach, secure access can become fragmented across an ever-growing application environment.
Explore zero-trust network access (ZTNA) with NordLayer.
Learn more ▶️ https://thn.news/developer-secrets-webinar
⚠️ Wikimedia says OpenAI agents tried to compromise Etherpad, modified wiki tooling for proxy use, and sent millions of automated requests.
It found no evidence its systems or data were compromised.
Read - https://thehackernews.com/2026/10/wikimedia-says-openai-agents-tried-to.html
MCP marketplaces have a trust problem.
OX Security analyzed 15,465 publicly indexed MCP servers across 5 registries and found no marketplace vetting.
Among the findings:
• 2.3% of hosts no longer resolve
• 6 use expired domains anyone could re-register
• 15.6% resolve outside the US
The risk is not MCP itself. It is trusting servers without verifying who runs them or where your data goes.
Read - https://thehacker…
Nearly half of IT and security pros say they lack full visibility into employee AI use.
Cristian Iordache of Bitdefender explains how GravityZone maps 700+ AI tools and helps teams allow, review, restrict, or block risky activity.
What AI security teams are missing: https://thehackernews.com/expert-insights/2026/10/your-employees-are-adopting-ai-faster.html
⚡ Google just paused product bug bounty rewards for some of its biggest open-source projects.
It says automated submissions surged, and the vast majority were invalid.
Go, Angular, Flutter, Bazel, and Protocol Buffers are among the affected projects. Supply chain rewards continue.
Read: https://thehackernews.com/2026/10/google-pauses-oss-product-bug-bounty.html
‼️ A critical Atlassian vulnerability rated CVSS 9.3 affects 8 Data Center products.
CVE-2026-21589 can let unauthenticated attackers read specific files if they know the exact file path. Internet-facing instances should be upgraded or restricted.
Details - https://thehackernews.com/2026/10/critical-atlassian-flaw-lets.html
‼️ A security patch wasn’t applied. Thousands of FBI employees had personal details stolen.
The FBI has now removed an Accenture contractor over the security failure tied to the ShinyHunters breach.
Read the full report → https://thehackernews.com/2026/10/fbi-removes-accenture-contractor-after.html
⚠️ Denmark says unauthorized parties accessed names, addresses and CPR numbers for about 8.8 million people, roughly 4 in 5 records in its national register, via a private company’s lawful access.
Automated lookups ran 10 days; police are investigating.
Details → https://thehackernews.com/2026/10/denmark-says-attackers-accessed-cpr.html
🚨 ClickFix has a new trick... the malicious payload is already sitting in your browser cache before you paste the command.
Compromised sites preload scripts disguised as PNGs, letting pasted commands bypass Windows Run's ~260-character limit and launch a multi-stage malware chain.
Read: https://thehackernews.com/2026/10/clickfix-smuggles-payloads-through.html
👏3
Showing the 12 most recent of 546 posts we hold for @thehackernews. View and reaction counts are the latest single reading for each post, not a live figure, and a recent post is still accumulating both. A view count marked ≈ was rounded by Telegram before we ever saw it — t.me prints views in full below 1,000 and to three significant figures above, so ≈1,200,000 means somewhere between 1,150,000 and 1,249,999. Unmarked counts are exact. Text is reproduced from the public post preview and truncated for length.
Forward network
Republished by
Channels on the register that have forwarded this channel's posts into their own feed.
Built only from forwarded posts we have actually read, on both sides. Coverage is early and deliberately incomplete: a missing link means we have not read the post that would prove it, never that the relationship does not exist. Counts are distinct forwarded posts observed, so they only ever go up as we read more.
Mentions
Named by 3 registered channels — every channel on the register whose own posts have named this one, by its current username or any other username it currently holds, merged from two separately captured readings of the same fact so a namer caught by only one of them is not missed and a namer both caught is not counted twice. A username this channel has since dropped is not matched — that handle may belong to someone else now, and crediting today’s namer to yesterday’s owner would misattribute it.
Named by
Channels on the register whose posts name this channel's handle.
A mention is a weaker signal than a forward and is counted separately for that reason — naming a channel is not republishing it, and a handle in a post body is easy to place deliberately. The post counts beside each row below are distinct posts in which the handle appeared, from posts we have read on both sides — the “Named by N registered channels” figure above is a different count, of distinct NAMING CHANNELS rather than posts, and is not the sum of the rows under it.
Channels Telegram recommends alongside this one
Telegram’s own answer, not this register’s. When this register asks Telegram’s API what is similar to this channel, this is the list it returns, in the exact order Telegram returns it — never re-sorted by subscribers or by anything else this register measures. The relationship, and the order, are Telegram’s; we record them and date them, and make no claim of our own about which of these channels actually resemble this one.
Read from Telegram’s recommendation API, most recently 13 August 2026. Telegram holds a list like this for a small and growing share of the register — how this is measured, and why most channel pages show nothing here.
Appears in Telegram’s recommendations for other channels
The reverse of the list above, and a different kind of signal. This does not require this channel to have ever been asked about directly — each row below is a channel we DID ask Telegram about, whose Telegram-generated list happened to include this one. A channel can appear here with an empty list above it, because being named by someone else’s query is independent of having been queried itself.
Cyber Security News @Cyber_Security_Channel · 56,790 Telegram ranks this channel #1 of 71 here — alongside 70 others — read 23 August 2026
🛡 Cybersecurity & Privacy 🛡 - News @cibsecurity · 28,431 Telegram ranks this channel #2 of 58 here — alongside 57 others — read 10 September 2026
Cyber Threat Intelligence @ctinow · 38,928 Telegram ranks this channel #2 of 42 here — alongside 41 others — read 31 August 2026
Hacker News @hacker_news_feed · 29,829 Telegram ranks this channel #3 of 79 here — alongside 78 others — read 8 September 2026
Mr.bingo_computers @mrbingocomputers · 45,181 Telegram ranks this channel #4 of 49 here — alongside 48 others — read 5 September 2026
Proton @proton_privacy · 27,919 Telegram ranks this channel #4 of 83 here — alongside 82 others — read 31 August 2026
The Bug Bounty Hunter @thebugbountyhunter · 51,241 Telegram ranks this channel #4 of 60 here — alongside 59 others — read 25 August 2026
Pentesting News @PentestingNews · 27,008 Telegram ranks this channel #7 of 46 here — alongside 45 others — read 12 September 2026
Offensive Xwitter @OffensiveTwitter · 21,079 Telegram ranks this channel #8 of 53 here — alongside 52 others — read 25 September 2026
Cyber Detective @cybdetective · 27,520 Telegram ranks this channel #8 of 49 here — alongside 48 others — read 11 September 2026
Codelivly - Your Journey To Cybersecurity @codelivly · 35,329 Telegram ranks this channel #10 of 41 here — alongside 40 others — read 8 September 2026
Hide01 @Hide01 · 35,481 Telegram ranks this channel #10 of 41 here — alongside 40 others — read 2 September 2026
Cyber Guardians @IRCyberGuardians · 20,028 Telegram ranks this channel #12 of 53 here — alongside 52 others — read 30 September 2026
Cyber Security Jobs @CyberSecurityJobs · 18,793 Telegram ranks this channel #13 of 47 here — alongside 46 others — read 5 October 2026
Dr.FarFar @Dr_FarFar_Channel · 43,002 Telegram ranks this channel #13 of 17 here — alongside 16 others — read 29 August 2026
vx-underground @vxunderground · 52,311 Telegram ranks this channel #13 of 41 here — alongside 40 others — read 24 August 2026
CyberDost @cyberdosti4c · 21,538 Telegram ranks this channel #15 of 60 here — alongside 59 others — read 23 September 2026
Hacker News @hackernewslive · 28,480 Telegram ranks this channel #15 of 50 here — alongside 49 others — read 10 September 2026
NetBlocks @netblocks · 48,180 Telegram ranks this channel #16 of 76 here — alongside 75 others — read 25 August 2026
🔗 Join in RedBlueTM 🎩 @RedBlueTM · 21,383 Telegram ranks this channel #19 of 36 here — alongside 35 others — read 23 September 2026
Artificial Intelligence @Artificial_Intelligence_COM · 72,032 Telegram ranks this channel #20 of 46 here — alongside 45 others — read 20 August 2026
Learn Cybersecurity @teammatrixs · 23,879 Telegram ranks this channel #22 of 26 here — alongside 25 others — read 17 September 2026
Tech Guide @techguide · 41,341 Telegram ranks this channel #23 of 76 here — alongside 75 others — read 29 August 2026
Interesting Engineering @ieofficial · 65,731 Telegram ranks this channel #25 of 92 here — alongside 91 others — read 21 August 2026
This channel appears in 44 seed channels' Telegram-generated recommendation lists in total, of which the 24 where it ranks highest are shown above. Each is Telegram’s list for THAT channel, not this one — see how this is measured.
Cite this entry
A live page changes as we take new readings, so a citation should name the measurement it is based on, not just the URL. The line below cites the subscriber count as measured 3 October 2026 — this
entry's latest reading, not the date you are reading this.
“The Hacker News” (@thehackernews), 163,733 subscribers as measured 3 October 2026. Telegram Register, tgregister.com/channel/thehackernews.
Full measurement history, CC BY 4.0. Every reading this register holds for this entry, not just the latest one, as a dated, downloadable record: CSV · JSON. Free to use with attribution to tgregister.com. Each file carries its own generation timestamp, which is the figure to cite for exactly when the data was retrieved.