Hacks of stars, 6 trillion dollars and Pushkin: the battle for your data. How to protect private life in the era of hackers | Anatoly Klepov

Pushkin. Stars and Hackers

 

A massive wave of social media hacks targeting Russian celebrities has swept the internet. Olga Buzova, Ksenia Borodina, Anna Kalashnikova, Oksana Samoylova, and Ida Galich. The accounts of the most popular bloggers have fallen into the hands of hackers.

 

The program’s expert explained the work of the scammers who hack celebrities’ social media accounts.

 

You can watch the full program at this link:

 

https://www.1tv.ru/news/2025-11-06/525281-ekspert_ob_yasnila_rabotu_moshennikov_cherez_akkaunty_zvezd_v_sotssetyah

 

I’ve been involved in cryptography my whole life. I protected the Central Bank of Russia’s financial system with my encryption tools (a fake payment order), developed the world’s first crypto smartphone with its own operating system, and much more.

 

But this was the first time I’d ever watched such a super-emotional program. Beautiful and very famous girls. Beautifully dressed. Well-spoken. And then suddenly hackers. The contrast is striking. Although I remember the information security of the Central Bank of Russia. My company trained about 6,000 Central Bank employees in three months to use encryption tools. More encryption specialists were trained than during the Great Patriotic War. These were mostly women. And they managed to reliably resist the world’s most powerful hackers, who stole more than three trillion rubles from the Bank. But they were also given the best encryption tools in the world for this.

 

Hollywood stars buy encryption tools from me to protect their personal information. They are also just as beautiful as our girls. And their information is being hunted. Their personal information is worth millions of dollars. But they find ways to reliably protect themselves.

 

I naturally understand the vulnerability of charming Russian women. They do everything to protect their personal information. But when they have a foreign phone in their hands, running a foreign operating system and built with foreign microchips, what real information security can they possibly have?

 

I was struck by the presentation about how easy it is to obtain information about a person’s medical research. There is a law on medical confidentiality, regulated by Article 13 of Federal Law No. 323-FZ “On the Fundamentals of Protecting the Health of Citizens in the Russian Federation.” Medical confidentiality includes information about requests for medical care, health status, diagnosis, and other information obtained during examination and treatment. Disclosure of this information is prohibited.

 

Sberbank estimates that damage from telephone fraud in 2024 will amount to at least 295 billion rubles, said Stanislav Kuznetsov, Deputy Chairman of the Management Board, during a speech at a joint meeting of the Council for the Development of the Digital Economy and the Council for the Development of the Financial Market under the Federation Council.

 

https://www.rbc.ru/life/news/67c701169a79471c14b76fa5

 

I couldn’t help but recall the famous words of Alexander Pushkin: “The thought that someone is eavesdropping on us drives me into a frenzy à la lettre 1). It’s perfectly possible to live without political freedom; without family immunity 2) it’s impossible: hard labor is far worse.”

 

According to the World Economic Forum in Davos, the annual criminal profits of hackers exceed six trillion dollars and continue to grow exponentially.

 

I’ll give you an interesting example: the meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and South Korean President Lee Jae-myung. Xi Jinping presented Lee Jae-myung with flagship Xiaomi phones for Lee and his wife (with Korean-made displays). Lee Jae-myung asked, “How’s the state of telecommunications security?” Xi Jinping replied, “You can check for backdoors.”

 

My company has thoroughly tested dozens of mobile phones from various manufacturers, including the operating systems they use. It’s safe to say that hackers, or whoever’s behind them, can remotely access a phone’s microphone. And if they use spyware like Pegasus, they can access all the phone’s data. There’s a well-known case of billionaire Bezos’s mobile phone being hacked.

 

Freedom! What A. Pushkin wrote about 200 years ago is becoming more and more relevant every year. Time will tell whether people will ultimately choose to be free and have 100% protection for their private information or live in an information prison run by hackers.

 

P.S. In Russia, I created a company, SecurityMax LLC, with my students. We know the methods and techniques hackers can use to hack information systems. That’s the main thing. We explain to company executives in simple terms not only how much money they can lose as a result of a hack of their company’s information system, but also how important it is to prevent the company and its executive from losing their prestige. A company’s prestige is built over many years and costs a lot of money.

 

© Anatoly Klepov, 2025