Trace
I wonder when they trace the Orange turd back to Moscow.
Met Police suspends use of phone-hacking software over Russian links
The Metropolitan Police has stopped using digital forensics software from Oxygen Forensics while it investigates US allegations that the supposedly American outfit was secretly owned by Russians and developing its wares in Moscow. Scotland Yard confirmed it has paused use of the company's tools and launched a "full review," …
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Friday 2nd October 2026 09:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
Hah.....Ever More Snoopong Software.....Surprise!
First: NSO Pegasus
Then: Paragon Graphite
Now: Oxygen
......how much more of this is doing the rounds?
......why are citizens being kept in the dark about the TORRENT of privacy outrages?
......by govenments, the NSA, GCHQ, The Met, Google, Meta, Amazon..............
Yup....way back when (1999) Scott McNealy suggested "You have no privacy....get over it".
But I never did "get over it"......even while it got worse and worse.
Remember Jamal Khashoggi!
Sigh!!!!
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Friday 2nd October 2026 10:47 GMT VoiceOfTruth
Allegations
By the 'US Department of Justice'. That won't be biased in any way, will it?
No doubt the 'solution' is some American backdoored thing, probably with a special hole for Palantir.
Anything from the USA should be considered as suspicious and a threat to national security. There were a couple more zero day backdoors this week in Cisco this week. Nothing to see here, move along.
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Friday 2nd October 2026 13:14 GMT Alan Mackenzie
.... through a Cyprus-based holding company.
Maybe if regulatory authorities were to outlaw such shenanigans, and require the beneficial owners of companies to be registered, such things wouldn't happen.
What's gone wrong, anyway? I don't understand. The software the police bought appears to be working properly, and isn't 'phoning home. So where's the problem?
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Friday 2nd October 2026 14:23 GMT Elongated Muskrat
Re: .... through a Cyprus-based holding company.
I can see a couple of problems:
1) The money being paid for it goes to a shady company based in Moscow, the problems with this should be self-evident, especially when under Putin, Russia is basically a hostile foreign government hell-bent on destabilising everybody else; a British statutory organisation like the Met (and other forces) giving taxpayer's money to Russia isn't a good look.
2) If the software is closed-source, which it almost certainly is, even if it is not conencted to the internet in any way, there is no guarantee that it does what it is supposed to so. For instance, it could be used to map out network infrastructure, for later data exfiltration, or it could be programmed to accidentally irreversibly wipe a device, rather than copy its contents, if it happens to meet certain criteria, in order to protect Russian assets within British organisation. It could be written to exploit vulnearbilities to insert malicious payloads into other software, and so on and so forth. Trusting software is hard enough, especially if you don't have the source code and haven't built it yourself, but if the supply chain is obviously untrustworthy (involving shell companies and misdirection), as it is in this case, the trustworthiness falls basically to zero.
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Friday 2nd October 2026 16:03 GMT tiggity
Re: .... through a Cyprus-based holding company.
@Elongated Muskrat
" Russia is basically a hostile foreign government hell-bent on destabilising everybody else"
Is that any different to the USA / Israel partnership?
I think they are doing a far better job than Russia.
In the UK we have recently seen big anti Russia propaganda campaign about Russia planning to declare war / invade most of Europe!
Which is farcical, given the struggles Russia is having in the battle with Ukraine.
About the only way Russia could endanger the UK is with nukes & if nukes fly everyone gets fucked anyway as they wont stop at European nations.
And an aging narcissist despot in charge of a nuke laden country is not unique to Russia!
Shell companies & use of countries with minimal financial reporting rules will continue as too many wealthy companies & individuals make use of such mechanisms (often to avoid huge amounts of tax) .
I for one would be ecstatic if there was full financial transparency & tax havens / shell companies / secret trusts etc. became outlawed worldwide, but it will not happen as too many powerfule people / companies would be inconvenienced & many of them have the ear (pockets?) of politicians they can rely on to stop financial transparency*.
* Occasionally a few pretend clamp downs, but nothing really happens e.g. UK government will periodically claim some action whilst simultaneously many British Overseas Territories are massive tax havens (waves at Bermuda where an old school friend of mine worked in financial services after qualifying in UK as an accountant & retired in his early 40's massively wealthy - in his early years there he often suggested I retrained & did the same, but I was sadly* encumbered by ethics!)
* still have ethics, which is why I am a) not retired b) do not have massive savings / investments
A clear conscience is good - but it unfortunately doesn't buy globe trotting holidays etc.
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Friday 2nd October 2026 20:23 GMT Sproggit
Re: .... through a Cyprus-based holding company.
"About the only way Russia could endanger the UK is with nukes & if nukes fly everyone gets fucked anyway as they wont stop at European nations."
Unfortunately this is far from the truth. First, Russian vessels are actively mapping all the undersea cables that bring parts of the internet backbone to the UK:-
https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/russian-vessels-mapping-uk-undersea-cables/
Because of geography and the UK's relationship with the US, loss of UK connectivity would impact the internet for much/most of Europe. Second, Russian aircraft are testing UK and European air defenses with more frequency and in ways which become equally more brazen:-
https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/russian-military-flights-near-uk-rising-defence-chief-says/
Third, Russia are believed to be behind a number of drone-based attacks and incidents across mainland Europe, such as this one:-
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5ylm3m67n2o
Fourth, Russia are believed to be maintaining/expanding attacks against dissidents in the UK and Europe. Many people have heard of the Alexander Litvinenko murder in 2006 (murdered with polonium-210 slipped in to his tea), but there have also been strikes against Sergei and Yulia Skripal, Maxim Kuzminov and numerous plots against prominent Russian exiles that have been thwarted by European security services.
Much of this activity - particular the mapping of undersea cables and probing of air defenses - continues today despite the conflict with Ukraine. Russia's losses on the battlefield are basically undeniable at this point - the satellite evidence of burned out tanks is simply too extensive to be denied. But here's the odd thing: Russia is estimated to have lost something like 12,300 tanks in the Ukraine conflict to date
https://ukr.warspotting.net/
and to have something like 2,080-2,100 left in a state at or close to operational readiness (reports seem to vary between 850-2100 as combat-viable)... yet the nation continues to attempt to use them to hold the territory gained since the start of the conflict.
https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/06/14/russia-has-drained-72-of-its-cold-war-tank-reserve-only-851-are-left-to-restore/
I mention all of the above to frame the observation that Russia does not appear to be acting rationally. Now, it might well be that they are playing a simple game of bluff - that a nation with a GDP smaller than that of Italy is continuing to try and project itself as a global superpower able to challenge the likes of the US military or the combined militaries of the EU nations... but at this point I think it not unfair to say that given the losses experienced to date, the opening of additional conflict with an EU nation - particularly a NATO nation - would be military suicide. This means one of a very small number of possibilities must be true:-
1. The military leaders around President Putin are lying to him about Russia's combat capability. OK fine, but would Putin believe that a militarily powerful nation would have met such devastating resistance from Ukraine?
2. Russia's non-Ukranian aggressive posturing is nothing more than a low-cost attempt at destabilizing alliances arranged against him - primarily the EU and NATO. OK fine, but when you're up to your eyeballs in a war that is not going well for you, why go and poke another bear? No pun intended.
3. Russia's leadership are following a single individual - President Putin - of whom they are terrified and whose orders they are carrying out despite their self-destructive nature simply because they have been given enough reason to believe that the alternative is to take a short trip out of a high window from a random building in Moscow, or that their aircraft might suddenly develop the same sort of "mechanical fault" that struck the one carrying Yevgeny Preigozhin, aka "Putin's Chef", the leader of the Wagner Group of mercenaries.
Unfortunately it is virtually impossible to know what is happening behind the scenes. But if you've ever read fictional books such as "Shogun", by James Clavell, you will have come across a simple and ages-old practice of using hostages - typically wives and children - to force the hand of even powerful people in to doing the bidding of a despot.
I have no idea where the truth lies. I do now, however, that from the available evidence, either we don't have the whole picture... or we do see everything that is happening/has happened and events are every bit as illogical as they appear, suggesting the person dictating events is not in any way rational.
Both scenarios should concern us - and our inability to determine the actual state of events on the ground should possibly concern us more.
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Monday 5th October 2026 14:35 GMT Elongated Muskrat
Re: .... through a Cyprus-based holding company.
Russia's activities across Europe are very asymmetric, compared to their disastrous war in Ukraine. Let's not forget that they had hoped to topple the Ukrainian government in only a couple of days, but their main tactic of bluffing didn't work, and lining their tanks up into a convenient traffic jam, which was supposed to be a show of force, became instead a farce for them.
Where theya re effective is in using small outlays to cause large disruptions; all those Russian connections to people invovled in the brexit campaign and the dark flows of money involved therein, funding of far-right groups in Eastern Europe (and Germany and France), sabotage and assassinations, all that moeny that seems to flow through shell companies in Cyprus, and so on - these all have relatively small costs in comparison to the prospective gains, and a lot of what Russia do is psy-ops and misdirection.
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Tuesday 6th October 2026 10:33 GMT DoctorPaul
Re: .... through a Cyprus-based holding company.
I live right on the east coast of England, lucky enough to have a house by the sea.
Every night I can hear the rumble of military jet engines (assuming anything that loud can't possibly be a commercial flight) out over the North Sea. Hopefully it's the RAF on patrol, not the Russians.
It's often occurred to me that if something nasty arrives from the east, I'll be one of the first to know.
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Monday 5th October 2026 14:29 GMT Elongated Muskrat
Re: .... through a Cyprus-based holding company.
Is that any different to the USA / Israel partnership?
I don't think I've ever expressed the opinion that this is a better thing. The US, especially at the moment, is just as untrustworthy as Russia, if not worse, or lying in the same bed. As for Israel, well I don't know about you, but I don't generally support any country that is actively pursuing a genocide.
A US or Israeli supply chain is eactly as trustworthy as a Russian one, it just happens to have a different despot at the top; although there are pletny of dodgy links to Putin in the US far right, just are there are plenty of dodgy links to Netanyahu.
As for Russia being a threat to the UK, well, you'd have to be a special kind of blind to not see the myriad ways in which Russia tries to destablise other coutnries, especially those it sees as economic or military rivals. There was clear interference in brexit, that mysteriously got buried by Johnson, at a time when he was enjoying hospitality in the form of yacht parties and free holidays from Russian billionaires. Putin's interference in european politics is hardly subtle, especially when he's pumping money into any far right groups he can find to try to destabilise the continent. He has already aprtially achieved his goal of destabilidsation through brexit, which makes Europe a more fragmented and less united adversary for him. Incidentally, the same end results are equally goals for the US and China, because Europe is larger than the US in population terms, and has a strong and growing economy with a lot more democracy and a lot less interference from the ultra-rich that the US. To the US, they are an economic and poltiical rival, just as much as they are to China or to Russia, or indeed to "middle powers" like India or Brazil. Actions that destabilise the continent, such as cleaving off nations from the EU, clearly benefit those other powers.
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Friday 2nd October 2026 15:28 GMT Androgynous Cupboard
Re: .... through a Cyprus-based holding company.
Every major scam I can think of in the last few years has involved a company registered in Cyprus - one I chased down myself, and the back half of the Private Eye is littered with them. Why the EU don't find them into penury is beyond me.
But yes, the fact they're running it air-gapped is actually a pleasant surprise., given this is the same Met Police that are hosting the rest of their date on Azure - given the difficulty in prosecuting US government and military employees for crimes in the UK, you can't help but wonder if those facts are somehow related....
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Monday 5th October 2026 12:25 GMT Anonymous Crowbar
Re: .... through a Cyprus-based holding company.
That should definitely be a concern. I imagine if a device had been pre-hacked by the Russians themselves, they could leave some kind of identifier there [no idea how/where, eg could they write to the ROM/BIOS/Bootloader with a tiny metadata blob?] that would do a different job if this seemingly innocuous flag is found. Something that _looks_ like it is doing the regular process, but slightly changed so it goes uunnoticed?
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Friday 2nd October 2026 17:18 GMT Tron
Mind the doors.
The humble door contains enough internal space to house an entire PC's worth of electronics, together with multiple batteries and a RF TRX. As well as snooping audio, it can collect biometric data from door handles.
Do you know who originally made your doors?
I strongly urge the Met police to remove all of their doors as a matter of urgency, and check them thoroughly.
You have to be very careful with doors.
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Saturday 3rd October 2026 23:56 GMT MachDiamond
Too much reliance
Facial recognition, phone exploiters, AI, ANPR and just tools, but that gets forgotten. They are not infallible and the more the filth rely on them, the more their investigatory skills atrophy. The clanker says a person is guilty and they just run with it even in the face of glaring discrepancies.
For tools such as this, it needs to be open source and some specialist agency within the government needs to be testing the snot out of it to make sure it isn't being fed stories.
I don't lock my phone at all. I don't have anything on it that's very critical. Nothing financial, certainly. The contact list is an abbreviated version of my full set of contacts as I do know some VIP's, but they aren't ringing me up out of the blue and I don't call them on a whim either. Well, a couple, but their entry is pseudonym. If I were doing dodgy things, I'd have one version of my phone that was vanilla and a memory card that keeps the goodies separate. I'd not have a "duress" PIN that wipes the phone, but could open a "version" that was kept sanitary. To wipe a phone with a code would only be useful if there were evidence so damning that taking a fall for tampering would be preferable.
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Monday 5th October 2026 14:41 GMT Elongated Muskrat
Digital forensics, such as accessing the phones and computers of someone arrested for a crime involving those devices. It's called evidence-gathering, and as long as it is done in a properly recorded way with preservation of chain-of-custody of any evidence that is gathered, and access with properly gained warrants, there's no issue. There's no qualitative difference between this and reading a suspect's posts on social media, or going through their bins, tapping their phones, etc. etc.
When the plod go off on fishing expeditions and do this sort of thing without reasonable suspicion or a warrant, or for personal reasons, then this is a problem. There has to be a balance between transparency and effective policing though. I happen to be of the opinion that the Met are terrible at finding that balance, and err far to much on the side of authoritarianism, but this is largely a political problem as much as it is a policing one.
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