Security News > 2021 > September > Lithuania tells its citizens to throw Xiaomi mobile devices in the bin
Lithuania's National Cyber Security Centre has told its citizens to get rid of Xiaomi-made mobile devices amid fears that the Chinese company could remotely enable censorship tools.
It has been established that during the initialisation of the system applications factory-installed on a Xiaomi Mi 10T device, these applications contact a server in Singapore at the address globalapi.
The local security agency's 32-page report, titled "Assessment of cybersecurity of mobile devices supporting 5G technology sold in Lithuania", focused on devices from Xiaomi, Huawei and OnePlus.
"It is believed that this functionality allows a Xiaomi device to perform an analysis of the target multimedia content entering the phone; to search for keywords based on the MiAdBlacklist list received from the server," said the Lithuanian report.
"Once the device determines that the content contains certain keywords, the device performs filtering of this content and the user cannot see it. The principle of data analysis allows analysis not only of words written in letters; the list that is regularly downloaded from the server can be formed in any language."
The agency said the censorship could be remotely re-enabled at any time by Xiaomi.