Andrei Pivovarov, the former director of Open Russia, said his phone was hacked by the FSB using equipment made by the Israeli company Cellebrite. The politician wrote about it on June 25 in his Telegram channel.
Further details were provided by the research group Citizen Lab, which found traces of surveillance equipment on Pivovarov’s iPhone. According to its specialists, Russian authorities gained access to his iPhone 12 around June 17, 2021, when he was already under arrest.
Pivovarov had been detained several weeks earlier in a case over the activities of an “undesirable organization,” namely Open Russia, which he had announced would be dissolved in May 2021. Citizen Lab’s analysis found that the hacking involved the Universal Forensic Extraction Device (UFED), a product designed to extract data from a device.
Pivovarov said that “virtually all information” was pulled from the phone, including correspondence with people involved in politics. He says investigators then used those messages to “invent a justification” that he had supposedly continued “criminal activity” as the head of Open Russia.
Citizen Lab noted that the phone was accessed after March 18, 2021, when Cellebrite had announced it would leave the Russian and Belarusian markets. The company is widely known as a major global supplier of tools used to unlock smartphones running Android and iOS.
Russian authorities had previously tried to use Cellebrite products to access the phone of Alexei Navalny ally Lyubov Sobol and of Dmitry Ivanov, the creator of the Protest MSU public page. In the United States, the article notes, the same equipment was used to access the phone of Thomas Matthew Crooks, who shot at Donald Trump during a rally in Pennsylvania in 2024.
Pivovarov had been imprisoned since May 2021. In 2024, he was transferred to Germany as part of a large prisoner exchange between Russia and Western countries. After his release, he was designated a “foreign agent.”