Russia cracked an activist's iPhone with Cellebrite software months after the Israeli firm said it had stopped operating there.
According to a Citizen Lab report, a Russian government unit used Cellebrite's forensic tool to break into the iPhone of a detained opposition politician. The firm had publicly announced its exit from Russia three months earlier. Citizen Lab backed its findings with forensic evidence and a Russian court document, giving the claim unusual documentary weight.
The case is a clean illustration of a pattern the security community has documented repeatedly: surveillance tools outlast the sales agreements that govern them. Once a government has the software, a vendor's announced departure means little — licenses can be extended, tools can be copied, and enforcement is practically nonexistent.
Cellebrite is not the first vendor to face this kind of exposure. NSO Group's Pegasus spyware turned up on devices in countries NSO claimed it did not serve. The recurring problem is structural: commercial surveillance tools are designed to be hard to detect and easy to deploy, which makes post-sale controls nearly impossible to enforce. A press release saying you've left a market is not the same as actually leaving it.