As it should, and US consumer protection is failing to act, this is from the report. People do not understand the level of control the Russian authorities maintain over businesses in Russia and citizens.
1. Flipper Devices Inc. is registered in USA as their main office, but no development or business is done at that address. The address belongs to a ”mailbox” company.
2. A majority of registered staff on LinkedIn were until recently registered in the Moscow region, (but suddenly moved to Tbilisi, Georgia according to their LinkedIn profiles.) - No developers remain in Russia according to LinkedIn.
3. TZOR and Neuron Hackspace shared the same address during the period of 2012-2013. (Neuron Hackspace used the address before TZOR was founded.) The Company of the founder of Neuron Hackspace, Esage Lab/TZOR, is placed on US sanction lists due to the DNC hack 2016, under the claim that the company provided tools to the Russian intelligence GRU and FSB. The attributions were validated both 2017 and 2020.
4. The Company and founder of Neuron Hackspace, Esage Lab/TZOR, had contracts with at least two companies that delivered services for the Russian government, FSB and the Russian
military.
5. The founder and CEO of Flipper Devices Inc., has been involved in activities, such as running the DDOS site putinvzrivaetdoma.org, that could have attracted the attention of Russian security services.
6. The founder and CEO of Flipper DevicesInc., has been involved in activities since he moved to Moscow that can be interpreted as actively supporting the authorities in Russia, like trying to sabotage Alexei Navalny’s blog in 2014 and building a tool, Zaborona_help, to circumvent Ukrainian blocking of the Russian websites
The assessment is that there is an even chance that Flipper Zero has links to Russian Intelligence Services. The founder and financier of Neuron Hackspace was placed under US-sanctions due to providing tools to FSB and GRU related to the DNC-hack. The validity of the investigations behind the US-sanctions has been confirmed in 2017 (Intelligence community assessment) and 2020 (Senate Intelligence Committee). Pavel Zhovner’s past activities and that he seems to have been an early member of Neuron Hackspace contribute to this assessment.
It is at the same time likely that Russian authorities are well aware of the distribution of Flipper Zero and monitors the situation for opportunities to gain other types of benefits, either in form of influence over the hacking community, recruitment of talented hackers for similar projects or even attacks of infrastructure or other targets in the future.
It is also likely that Russian authorities will remain to have a substantial influence or control over this hacker community and could benefit from the future possibility to recruit talents with some form of combined security and IT background or even to blackmail foreigners that have been connected to this community.