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The software US federal agents used to pull data off locked phones came from a company whose real owners sat in Moscow.
For years, the Secret Service, Homeland Security Investigations and the Department of Defense paid a Virginia-based firm called Oxygen Forensics to crack open mobile devices in US investigations.
Prosecutors now say the people behind the firm were not who the paperwork claimed.
On September 23, the Justice Department unsealed a conspiracy-to-commit-wire-fraud complaint against Oxygen’s chief executive Lee Reiber, 55, of Boise, Idaho, and Russian co-owner and chief technology officer Oleg Davydov.
Both men had been arrested three days earlier, on September 20: Reiber in Idaho, where he was released on bail, and Davydov at London’s Heathrow Airport as he prepared to board a flight to Istanbul, according to RFE/RL and court filings.
Prosecutors allege Davydov, together with four other Russian nationals, controlled Oxygen Forensics through a Cyprus holding company and routed its software development to a Moscow-based sister firm.
Same code sold to the FSB
That Moscow sister company, MKO Systems LLC, is at the center of the US national-security concern.
According to the DOJ complaint, the Russian entity sold the same forensic software to Russia’s Federal Security Service, the Investigative Committee and the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
Davydov is the only Russian co-owner named in the DOJ complaint; the four other Russian nationals cited as co-conspirators are not individually identified.
Separate corporate-registry research by compliance firm Kharon identified two of the Cypriot parent’s other shareholders as Sergey Sokolov and Galina Rabotenko.
The FSB is Russia’s main domestic intelligence agency, the successor to the Soviet-era KGB.
The Justice Department has stressed that it is not alleging the software shipped to US agencies contained malicious code or that it was used to gain unauthorized access to customer systems.
The charge is that American buyers were kept in the dark about who owned the vendor.
Over $2 million in federal contracts
Court papers cited by CyberScoop put the government business at more than $2 million from the Secret Service and its National Computer Forensics Institute alone since March 2022.
Reiber certified to procurement officials in 2022 and 2023 that Oxygen Forensics had no immediate or highest-level foreign owner, prosecutors say, and told DHS personnel in March 2026 that no Russians were involved in the software’s development.
“Procurement officials at the U.S. government customers have represented that they would not have awarded or renewed contracts for the forensic software had they known that OxygenUS was a Russian-owned company,” the complaint states, as quoted by CyberScoop.
Hunter Biden laptop analysis used the tool
Oxygen’s software was also the tool a former Secret Service agent, Konstantinos “Gus” Dimitrelos, used to extract tens of thousands of files from a copy of the Hunter Biden laptop hard drive, an analysis that fed into political debates about the device during the 2020 election cycle.
Davydov remained in British custody pending expected extradition to the United States, according to RFE/RL.
The Secret Service canceled a major contract with Oxygen in February, citing “security risks,” while the State Department signed a new contract with the company in August, weeks before the charges were announced.
