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An investigation revealed that Russian software managed to infiltrate applications of the United States Army and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The situation occurred after it was thought that the computer code came from a company based in the United States.
The authorities managed to discover the situation after an investigation carried out by the Reuters news agency, in which they specified that thousands of applications were affected by the use of said computer code.
The authorities explained that they were deceived into thinking that the software had been created by a company called Pushwoosh, based in Washington DC However, in reality said company is based in the city of Novosibirsk in Siberia (Russia).
The investigation carried out by Reuters revealed that despite the fact that Pushwoosh employs more than 40 people in Russia and in 1238880230 reported revenue of $2.4 million, the company claims to be est American. This is reflected in the regulatory documents submitted to the United States authorities, where they claim to have offices in California, Maryland and Washington DC
After to make all this information known the CDC announced that it removed all the applications that had been compromised. For its part, the Army reported that it had previously been aware of this situation, and therefore in March it had taken a similar measure. This is extremely important because the application that contained the Russian software was used by soldiers in a large part of the military training bases throughout the country .
What does Pushwoosh do?
According to the Pushwoosh website the company is dedicated to creating code and providing support when it comes to data processing for software developers. As part of their work they are dedicated to helping to profile how users behave when they are using applications for smartphones
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From the company they maintain that they are not in charge of collecting or processing sensitive information. However, the problem with having used software from this company in applications used by the Army and the CDC lies in the fact that in the past the Russian government has forced the companies of that country to share with them information of their users.
This implies that Russia would be able to have access to information about American soldiers, something that depending on the type of data collected could represent a national security risk.
Max Konev, founder of Pushwoosh, assured that at no time did he try to hide the Russian origin of the company. He added that his company has no ties to the Russian government and that the data collected by Pushwoosh is stored on servers in the United States and Germany.
“I am proud to be Russian and I would never hide it,” he said.
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