Russia Forces Apple to Remove LinkedIn From Russian App Store

Russian authorities have required Apple and Google to remove the LinkedIn app from the App Store and Google Play in Russia, reports The New York Times. The move comes a couple weeks after Russia blocked LinkedIn's website.

The demand by Russian authorities to remove LinkedIn in Apple and Google app stores comes weeks after a court blocked the professional networking service for flouting local laws that require internet firms to store data on Russian citizens within the nation’s borders.

Apple confirmed to The New York Times that it was asked to remove the app from the App Store about a month ago. The app, however, had already stopped functioning once LinkedIn's website was blocked in the country. LinkedIn, which has several million users in Russia, said it was "disappointed" by the news.

The service was blocked in Russia because a court ruled in November that the company broke local laws that require Internet firms to store servers holding information on Russian accounts within the country. The New York Times notes that most American companies operate in Russia while violating the law, making the blocking of LinkedIn a rare occurrence.

In late December, China required Apple to remove all apps from The New York Times for being in "violation of local regulations." The New York Times' website has been blocked in China since 2012. Countries like China, Russia and Turkey have blocked direct access to websites for years, but pressuring tech companies like Apple to also remove apps is a more recent trend, according to The New York Times.

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Top Rated Comments

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pika2000

34 months ago

How broke is the Russian government when it needs linkedin to help them keep tabs on the citizenry?

How broke is the American government that it needs backdoors from all the tech companies to help them keeping tabs on the citizens?

Rating: 57 Votes

Jess13

34 months ago

And remember what NSA and GCHQ do to unsuspecting LinkedIn members.

How to Detect Sneaky NSA ‘Quantum Insert’ Attacks

https://www.wired.com/2015/04/researchers-uncover-method-detect-nsa-quantum-insert-hacks/

How Quantum Insert Works

According to various documents leaked by Snowden and published by The Intercept and the German newspaper Der Spiegel, Quantum Insert requires the NSA and GCHQ to have fast-acting servers relatively near a target’s machine that are capable of intercepting browser traffic swiftly in order to deliver a malicious web page to the target’s machine before the legitimate web page can arrive.

To achieve this, the spy agencies use rogue systems the NSA has codenamed FoxAcid servers, as well as special high-speed servers known as “shooters,” placed at key points around the internet.

In the Belgacom hack, GCHQ first identified specific engineers and system administrators who worked for the Belgian telecom and one of its subsidiaries, BICS. The attackers then mapped out the digital footprints of chosen workers, identifying the IP addresses of work and personal computers as well as Skype, Gmail and social networking accounts such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Then they set up rogue pages, hosted on FoxAcid servers, to impersonate, for example, an employee’s legitimate LinkedIn profile page.

The agencies then used packet-capturing tools that sniffed or sifted through internet traffic—which can occur with the cooperation of telecoms or without it—to spot footprints or other markers that identified the online traffic of these targets. Sometimes the fingerprints involved spotting persistent tracking cookies that web sites assigned to the user.

When the sniffers spotted a “GET request” from a target’s browser—messages sent by the browser to call up a specific URL or web page such as the user’s LinkedIn profile page—it would notify the NSA’s high-speed shooter server, which would then kick into action and send a redirect or “shot” to the browser. That shot was essentially a spoofed Transmission Control Protocol ('http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/T/TCP.html') (TCP) packet that would redirect the user’s browser to a malicious LinkedIn page hosted on a FoxAcid server. The FoxAcid server would then download and install malware on the victim’s machine.

Thanks, Snowden. “Thanks,” Obama.

Rating: 19 Votes

britboyj

34 months ago

You know this mainly about Russia falsely being accused about hacks.

You need to try a different news source than Facebook and Breitbart.

Rating: 16 Votes

TheColtr

34 months ago

It's ironic that companies won't keep information of Russian citizens, but I'm sure if the US government went to LinkedIn that the company would hand every bit of data they had on everyone to the government.

Rating: 15 Votes

KiwiAdventure

34 months ago

I don't like LinkedIn its like a virus and infiltrates everywhere.

Rating: 8 Votes

Zombie Acorn

34 months ago

How broke is the Russian government when it needs linkedin to help them keep tabs on the citizenry?

I hope you aren't a US citizen.
[doublepost=1483756113][/doublepost]

They already have, the US government has worked with all of these social media companies to "catch terrorists".

Rating: 8 Votes

Kaibelf

34 months ago

How broke is the Russian government when it needs linkedin to help them keep tabs on the citizenry?

There's only so much money to go around, and most of it's wrapped up in Putin and his cronies' interests.

Rating: 7 Votes

Jess13

34 months ago

Of course I have no knowledge of this. I do however like to imagine we are getting our tax dollars' worth from our puzzle palaces' infrastructure and the brains of the puzzle solvers who work there. In fact I'd be annoyed if that's not true.

Prepare to be annoyed. NSA whistleblower Bill Binney Q&A.

[MEDIA=youtube]3owk7vEEOvs[/MEDIA]

Rating: 7 Votes