Do not put the phone, report

In Kazakhstan, users are recommended to put a program for monitoring smartphones for the sake of safety

From the end of this week, residents of the Kazakhstan capital-Nur-Sultan-began to receive messages from operators with a request to establish a special security certificate on their gadgets, which will make their life more beautiful and safer.

"In accordance with the Law" On Communication "Art. 26 To access the Internet you need to set a security certificate. We ask you to install on each subscription device that has an Internet access (smartphone, tablet, laptop). The absence of a security certificate on the device will lead to problems with access to individual Internet resources, ”such messages (punctuation are saved) came to subscribers of the three largest operators-Kcell, Beeline and Tele2.

Representatives of telecommunication companies in the comments with excited Kazakhstani media also emphasized: this certificate was developed by “competent authorities”, so the question of whether to trust it or not is worth it.

From this wish to subscribers, the ears of Comrade Major stick out so defiantly that it becomes clear: no one hides, in whose interests the certificate is needed.

The special services of Kazakhstan have been worn with the idea of ​​a security certificate for almost five years: the official version is that Kazakhstanis need to protect against malicious sites like those that are engaged in phishing - that is, theft of passwords and personal data of users. Certificates installed on gadgets are fraud insurance: Kazakhstanis back in 2016 offered to accept this thesis for granted.

“This principle is known as“ Man in the Middle ”,” says Mikhail Klimarev, IT specialist, director of the Internet Society. - The user sends a request through this certificate, and then this server already sends a request to the site. The site thinks that the user has connected to him, and sends the information to the "person in the middle", and only he already redirects the information to you. "

The filter is not just an intermediary, but in itself phishing, that is, the abduction of user information, but only on a state scale.

Special services in this way can collect information about user requests, and if desired, get passwords from mail or social networks (if users enter them regularly).

Three years ago, special services failed to establish all this certificate: programmers of the Russian -language segment of the Kazakh Internet were publicly outraged by the fact of state censorship, painted the mechanism of work, and the rules for installing these certificates disappeared from the websites of telecommunication companies. In 2019, the special services of Kazakhstan, to whom the new president Kasim-Zhomart Tokaev gave the leadership in the country, decided to make a new entry and play on trust: if you are received by SMS message, where the need to install a certificate is described as a given, it is difficult to object in response in response.

True, if even special services were able to convince users to put an unknown something on their gadgets, it would still not work. Mikhail Klimarev says that modern browsers have already learned to repel such attacks, and the certificate from the National Security Committee simply will not work. “Moreover, 90% of people will listen to the operator and try to establish this certificate, but it simply cannot be done without appropriate qualifications. And for a long time this certificate was made only under Windows and is incompatible with either iOS or Android, ”the IT specialist explains. Such equipment is necessary for “catching villains”, but not a single sane violator will never install this certificate voluntarily, Klimarev adds:

“Special services will view ordinary users and only find out that they are sitting on Facebook or watching porn.”

In addition, Kazakhstani special services seem to have no capacities to ensure uninterrupted operation of the Internet in the new conditions. Perhaps that is why on July 19, the vice-minister of digital development, innovation and aerospace industry Ablaikhan Ospanov separately stated that all this is "so far voluntarily: you can install, you can not install it." But he himself promised to establish a certificate as soon as the message came, "to himself and his children." “You probably see when banners pop up on some sites. Just with such a security certificate, the child simply will not be able to click and switch to the resource, ”the Tengrinews website quotes the official.

A bad example - especially if it is unique - is contagious, so many are afraid that Russian special services will want to intercept the experience of neighbors. But IT experts still doubt this: if you do it as they do in Kazakhstan, troubles and image losses more than potential benefits. The Russian special services have enough other mechanisms for surveillance of "unreliable" users. And the Kazakhstani initiative turned out to be so unconvincing that even ordinary people who had previously registered their telephone devices and stood in many hours to tell the state where they live for more than ten days a year in a row did not believe in it.