Russia Used Cellebrite on Jailed Activist's iPhone Months After Sales Cutoff
Summary: Citizen Lab reported on June 25 that Russian authorities used Cellebrite's UFED forensic tools to extract data from opposition activist Andrey Pivovarov's iPhone 12 in June 2021, three months after Cellebrite said it would stop selling to Russia and Belarus. The finding rests on a June 17, 2021 USB pairing on the phone matching a Cellebrite fingerprint from a prior Jordan case, plus a Russian Interior Ministry forensic report naming UFED Physical Analyzer and UFED 4PC and documenting searches for Open Russia and named opposition figures.
What you should know: Cellebrite's March 2021 cutoff stopped updates but left offline-capable UFED hardware running in Russian police and intelligence offices, and the tool still worked when investigators had Pivovarov's phone in custody. The names searched on that phone later surfaced as targets of the FSB-linked COLDRIVER phishing operation, which is the mechanism to sit with: extract one activist's social graph and you have the target list for the next campaign.
Read the original at The Hacker News ↗
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