Seven major Russian banks switch to state-run certificate authority after Western sanctions forced migration from Chinese provider; Ministry asks users to manually install root certificate enabling potential government surveillance of encrypted traffic.

HTTPState. Seven Russian banks have moved to a certificate authority run by the state, which also helps sifting through users’ traffic

Photo: MediazonaThis week, the websites of major Russian banks—Sber, VTB, Rosselkhozbank, T-Bank, Uralsib, Promsvyazbank and Bank Saint Petersburg—began serving TLS certificates issued by Russia’s Ministry of Digital Development, Mediazona discovered. Just last week, on July 31, all of them were still using certificates from the Chinese authority TrustAsia.The migration is uneven. T-Bank moved only tinkoff.ru, which references the bank’s more common older name, leaving tbank.ru still on US-based...