Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto and the US-based group Access Now have published a report on Russian security officers’ use of the Israeli company Cellebrite’s UFED system to extract data from the iPhone of opposition politician Andrei Pivovarov. Mediazona reviewed the document before publication.
Pivovarov was detained on May 31, 2021, at St. Petersburg airport before leaving the country, removed from his flight and accused of leading Open Russia, the organization founded by Mikhail Khodorkovsky that Russian authorities had labeled “undesirable.” Although the group had been dissolved before his arrest, in July 2022 Krasnodar’s Leninsky District Court sentenced him to four years in prison. On August 1, 2024, he was released as part of a prisoner exchange with Western countries.
In 2025, after relocating to Germany, Pivovarov asked Citizen Lab to examine his iPhone 12. The report says researchers concluded with a high degree of confidence that Cellebrite tools were used to extract data from the device on or around June 17, 2021, roughly three months after the company said it had stopped sales to Russia.
According to the researchers, the authorities obtained a large volume of information by reviewing files as well as SMS, WhatsApp, Viber and Telegram messages on several devices, using keywords tied to Open Russia, United Democrats, and the names of Pivovarov’s associates and prominent figures in civil society and the opposition.
The report says investigators were interested in data connected to Tatyana Usmanova, Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Anastasia Burakova, who now heads the organization Ark. It also says Burakova may have been targeted in 2024 in a large-scale attack attributed to the Coldriver hacking group, which is linked to the FSB, but she did not open the phishing file sent to her. Another unsuccessful target of the same campaign was identified as Maksim Dbar, previously mentioned as Khodorkovsky’s press secretary.
Mediazona notes that in spring 2021 it had already reported attempts to break into Lyubov Sobol’s phones using Cellebrite products that were officially supplied to Russia’s Investigative Committee. After that publication, Israeli lawyer and human rights advocate Eitay Mack went to court seeking a ban on the company’s sales to Russia, and Cellebrite soon announced it would halt supplies to Russia and Belarus. Even so, after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the technology was reportedly used again to access the phone of Dmitry Ivanov, author of the Telegram channel Protest MSU.
Citizen Lab senior researcher John Scott-Railton told Mediazona that if the company wants to stop serving political repression, it should end sales to autocracies, remotely disable its products after credible reports of abuse, and eliminate the ability to claim ignorance by using cryptographic signatures on every device used to extract data.