A US company specializing in data mining, accused by US authorities of being actually owned and operated by Russians, with ties to the FSB, Moscow's intelligence agency, worked on EU-funded projects and sold its services to European law enforcement agencies, including Italian ones. Among these, the Sassari prosecutor's office.
Politico.eu reports this, based on documents reviewed by the newspaper. Oxygen Forensics, officially headquartered in Virginia, develops software to extract and analyze information from smartphones and computers. The U.S. Department of Justice claims the software was developed and operated by a team in Russia led by Russian citizen Oleg Sergeyevich Davydov, who, according to Politico, was arrested Sunday at London's Heathrow Airport as he was preparing to board a flight to Istanbul.
Politico.eu cites a technical document from the Sassari Prosecutor's Office dated April 2026 that lists Oxygen Forensics among the systems that can be used by judicial police to extract and analyze data from mobile devices.
The document states that "the judicial police must use specialized hardware and software tools recognized in the forensic field, provided they are updated, validated, and suitable for the specific task to be performed. In the mobile field, extraction and analysis systems such as Cellebrite UFED/Inseyets, GrayKey, MSAB XRY, Oxygen Forensics, Magnet Axiom, and other equivalent tools may be used, among others."
Natalia Krapiva, senior legal advisor at the digital rights organization Access Now, said that civil society organizations had been warning for years about the ties between the Russian firm Oxygen Forensics and Russia. "If Russian-made software, designed for the FSB and the Investigative Committee, was indeed used to manage the European Commission's criminal evidence database , this raises a serious risk that sensitive information was compromised and made accessible to Russian authorities," Krapiva said.
(Unioneonline/E.Fr.)
