The West intends to block Russians’ phones: risks for citizens are named

Avoiding the brick mode is not easy

IT companies Apple and Google may block all iPhones and smartphones in Russia if the confrontation with the West reaches its climax – this version of events was put forward by Anton Gorelkin, deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, Technology and Communications, during one of his interviews. Nikita KULIKOV, General Director of ANO PravoRobotov, explains how likely such a scenario is and how it threatens ordinary users.

– Today in Russia, due to a new package of EU sanctions, the cloud services of Microsoft, Amazon and Google have stopped working. True, these restrictions apply only to corporate users for now. But what if not only companies, but also ordinary citizens fall under the sanctions?

– To be honest, I doubt that Western companies will take such reputational risks. It’s one thing to restrict business services, it’s quite another to hit ordinary users. The population of Russia is 146 million people, and mobile devices (smartphones, tablets and smart watches) are twice as many. And it turns out that this blow will fall on all citizens. And if such actions hostile to the Russian population by foreign companies are actually carried out, then it will immediately become clear that subversive activities are being carried out specifically against ordinary people, because the victims of such an almost terrorist act will be those who spent their money on purchasing goods from these companies.

– Is such a shutdown in remote access possible from a purely technical point of view?

– Modern smartphones are designed in such a way that in the event of a global failure of the operating system (OS), or, say, its disconnection from the main server, some functions, if not all at once, may be unavailable. This is primarily due to the presence of “bookmarks” in these operating systems, similar to virus software. But if virus software makes such bookmarks only if the system is infected, then bookmarks were made in these running OSs from the very beginning, which is why smartphones are constantly searching for the Internet and communication with their main server.

– Is there any way to counter this?

– Unfortunately, you can’t do anything with this on the official smartphone firmware. Therefore, there really is a risk of losing the entire database: telephone contacts, video and photo archives, other personal information – it all depends on the specific gadget OS and its architecture. Something similar happened some time ago, when Xiaomi smartphones, after updating, entered “brick” mode – this was a clear illustration of such blocking.

– What if you ask some craftsmen to hack and “reflash” the gadget?

– Yes, this is the only way out – to install “broken” firmware, disconnected from the main server, but in this case it is possible to lose some of the functions of the smartphone. On the one hand, it will not be entirely comfortable, but, on the other hand, the device will work. The situation is a little simpler with smartphones based on an open architecture, which is distributed among programmers and supports the ability to create a new OS based on it – in such smartphones, if you have some experience, you can install an unauthorized operating system.