Cellebrite said it cut off Russia, but Russia used is tools anyway

In an email to the Citizen Lab, which he shared with TechCrunch, Cellebrite’s chief marketing officer David Gee said that the company “stopped all sales and services to the Russian Federation in March 2021, terminating existing licenses, and immediately began unwinding all legal contracts. Any use of legacy Cellebrite hardware in Russia after March 2021 is entirely unauthorized.”

Gee, as well as Cellebrite’s spokesperson Victor Cooper, did not respond to a series of specific questions sent by TechCrunch.

In the case of Pivovarov, the Citizen Lab researchers said they were able to find forensic evidence on his phone that it had been hacked with Cellebrite UFED, after Russian authorities detained him and confiscated his iPhone 12 and MacBook in May 2021. 

Pivovarov also shared with the researchers a court document he received as part of his prosecution. In it, the Russian government’s Criminalist Expert Center detailed its use of Cellebrite UFED to break into his phone, stating that the authorities used UFED to extract data including WhatsApp and Telegram messages. They also searched the phone for political terms, as well as the names of opposition figures, which included targets of what researchers have described as alleged Russian government hacking campaigns.   

Pivovarov was the director of the now defunct opposition group Open Russia. He was later sentenced to four years in prison, before being freed in August 2024 as part of a prisoner exchange between Russia and Western countries that also freed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich.

The Russian Embassy in Washington D.C. did not respond to a request for comment.