Met Police pauses Oxygen Forensics over alleged hidden Russian ownership
Serguey Asael Shinder2 min readLondon's Metropolitan Police has stopped using digital forensics software from Oxygen Forensics while it carries out a "full review", The Register reports. The pause follows charges by US prosecutors that the company, which presented itself as American, was secretly owned by Russians and developed its software in Moscow.
According to the US Department of Justice, Oxygen, based in Alexandria, Virginia, sold to US government customers as an independent American company while being owned and controlled by five Russian nationals through a Cyprus holding company. Prosecutors say the same five owned Moscow-based MKO Systems, formerly Oxygen Software, where the software was actually written, and which sold the technology in Russia under other names to customers reportedly including the FSB. Oxygen's CEO Lee Reiber and Russian national Oleg Sergeyevich Davydov are accused of concealing the ownership. Davydov was arrested at Heathrow last month and has been refused bail while the US seeks his extradition. The DoJ is not alleging that the software contained malicious code or was used to access customer systems or data.
The Met signed a three-year deal with Oxygen in December 2023; its teams use the software to extract and analyse data from seized phones and other devices. A spokesperson said any impact on ongoing investigations would be "extremely limited", that the software runs on a closed system not connected to the internet, that no investigation data is shared with the company, and that it was used in under 0.2 per cent of more than 23,000 actions by the digital forensics team in the past year. The National Police Chiefs' Council said other UK forces use Oxygen products and have been encouraged to carry out their own assessments, stressing that these remain allegations. Romanian authorities have begun ending their use of Oxygen products, and Latvia's State Police has suspended them.
Why it matters
The case is not about a backdoor but about provenance: who writes the code that touches seized evidence, and whether buyers were told. For any organisation buying security tooling, it is a reminder that a supplier's stated nationality is a claim, and that ownership checks belong in procurement alongside the technical review.