Google, Apple and numerous US authorities have long assumed that the software manufacturer Pushwoosh is a US company. But then there are doubts. According to one report, the company hails from Russia. The founder claims to have never hidden his origins.
According to the Reuters news agency, thousands of apps in Apple and Google’s online stores contain a code from Pushwoosh, which claims to be a US company but is based in Russia.
Pushwoosh offers code and data processing assistance to software developers. They can use it to create profiles of users’ online activities and thus send customized notifications. Customers included the US military, which, however, stopped using it in March for security reasons. The US disease agency CDC removed the Pushwoosh code from its apps after Reuters pointed out the Russia connection. “The CDC assumed Pushwoosh was a Washington DC area company,” a spokeswoman said.
In fact, in the US, the company is posing as an American company in official documents and on social media, which is said to be based in California, Maryland or the Washington County at various times. However, as can be seen from publicly available documents in Russia, the headquarters are in Novosibirsk. About 40 people are employed there, and the turnover last year was the equivalent of 2.4 million dollars. Pushwoosh is registered with the Russian authorities and pays taxes in Russia.
In the past, officials in Russia have forced local companies to hand over user data to the secret services. There were no indications of misuse of the data collected by Pushwoosh. “The data Pushwoosh collects is similar to what might be collected by Facebook, Google or Amazon,” said security researcher Zach Edwards, who discovered the prevalence of the company’s code while working for Internet Safety Labs. “But the difference is that all Pushwoosh data in the US is sent to servers controlled by a company in Russia.”
Google and Apple declined to comment specifically on Pushwoosh. According to Appfigures experts, the company’s code can be found in nearly 8,000 apps in their stores. Pushwoosh founder Max Konev said in an email to Reuters in September that his company had never tried to hide its Russian roots. “I am proud to be Russian and would never hide it,” he wrote. After the research was published, the company then explained in a blog post that it had never owned a company registered in the Russian Federation. Rather, Pushwoosh outsourced some tasks to a Russian company in Novosibirsk. This contract was terminated in February 2022. Pushwoosh’s data would be stored in the US and Germany.
