ICE purchased phone hacking software linked to Russian FSB, report says
ICE has long cooperated with a company of Russian origin (Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder)
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has purchased phone-hacking software for Immigration and Customs Enforcement from a company with reported ties to Russia’s Federal Security Service, according to an investigation cited by The Moscow Times.
The report draws on research by Olga Lautman, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, and journalist Andriy Luchkov.
In 2024, ICE signed a three-year contract with Virginia-based Oxygen Forensics Inc., the authors said. The software is designed to extract data from smartphones, including messages, deleted files, location history, app data and other information.
Oxygen Forensics Inc. was registered in the United States in 2013. Its listed clients include the FBI, the State Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration, with contracts reportedly in effect through at least September 2026.
The company expanded from Oxygen Software, which was founded in Moscow in the early 2000s. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has reported that one of the investors is Eduard Bendersky, a former officer in Russia’s FSB Vympel special forces unit and the father-in-law of Maxim Yakubets, the alleged leader of the Evil Corp hacking group, who is wanted by the FBI.
According to the analysts, the use of Russian-developed forensic tools in U.S. investigative systems is not new. In 2016 and 2017, Oxygen Forensics and other Eastern European firms supplied data extraction tools to U.S. federal agencies. Those arrangements continued even after increased scrutiny of Russian cyber operations following interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
The authors noted there is no public evidence of direct cooperation between Russian intelligence services and U.S. agencies using Oxygen’s software. However, records indicate a supply chain for technology that “crosses geopolitical fault lines.”
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