A report says an official US Army app had Russian code and might have harvested data for Russia.

Officials in the US and western countries have grown more concerned about Pushwoosh app software as they have grown more suspicious about other foreign apps, such as TikTok.

The app was developed for a critical Army base in the United States by a firm registered in Russia and operated out of Russia. According to Reuters, the firm may have been forced to gather information for the Russian government, which would have jeopardized critical US military data. The firm has claimed that it did not share data with the Russian government.

Reuters exclusively reported Monday that Pushwoosh, a software company, was misrepresenting itself as an American firm. Reuters furthermore discovered that the company created an app for the US Army and the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), raising the concern that Russian authorities might request companies operating in Russia to hand over app user data.

According to company documents obtained by Reuters, Pushwoosh is headquartered in Novosibirsk, Russia, and pays taxes there.

Pushwoosh
(Source: pushwoosh.com)

Pushwoosh has developed software for a variety of clients worldwide.

The company developed an app for the US Army’s National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California. Fort Irwin is a crucial training ground for units preparing for overseas deployments, according to C4ISRNET.

The Pushwoosh firm developed code used on the CDC’s main app and other CDC apps tracking health data, for example. It has also been used by Unilever Plc, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), the National Rifle Association (NRA), and Britain’s Labour Party, among other Pushwoosh software users.