Cyber security threats in Russia and its neighbors in the west are escalating. In the past few years, Russia violated many land borders by unannounced crossing and humiliating their privacy. Russia has been developing and employing offensive cyber capabilities for years. Russian cyber attacking groups consist of professionals, highly skilled practitioners, whose daily jobs are to prepare and carry cyber attacks.

Recently few days back, the Russian government is planning to pass a new mass surveillance bill, which will allow the Russian Federal Security Service to monitor the chats of every single messaging application in Russia.

In this bill, they demands the backdoor to every messaging app. The provider of apps like Whatsapp, Viber, Telegram and others are required to provide necessary backdoors to the government or they could face a fine of up to 1 million rubles.

The bill is suggested by Russian Senator Elena Mizulina, who said on a TV show that, she is deeply concerned about the closed chatrooms on messaging apps. Teenagers are being targeted, brain-washed by extremist to do criminal activities and different attacks.

This bill will help Russian government to monitor every messaging app to detect such chats that are suspicious or related to any terrorist. The bill has already been approved by Duma (a Russian’s lower Legislative House) and if this legislation is passed into law, then each and every messaging app must follow the law and provide backdoors to the government of face fine.

This bill also states that the citizens who complies decrypting electronic communication will face a fine range between 3000-5000 rubles, while officials who stand in the way can potentially be fined 30,000-50,000 rubles.

As we have already known that, Whatsapp already implemented end to end encryption to secure user’s communication from intruders. Viber also announced this feature to its messenger, but after this law government will be able to monitor all applications including those with End-to-End encryption. These applications now have to choose whether to make their services unavailable after this law or provide backdoors and compromise their customer’s privacy.