GrapheneOS is an open source project. Open source means it can be modified and used for any purpose including commercial ones. People making forks of GrapheneOS are supposed to rebrand it and make it clear that it’s not the official GrapheneOS but rather a derivative of it.
A bunch of companies and individuals have sold devices with GrapheneOS or a fork of it. Many companies making forks of GrapheneOS haven’t complied with our open source licenses and our separate rules for usage of our trademarks which we’ve been actively addressing for years.
From 2018 through around 2021, Abdoul Rasnab sold devices with his own proprietary fork of GrapheneOS. That’s 4 years after the project was started. He had no involvement in creating or founding GrapheneOS. He also didn’t write absolutely any of the GrapheneOS project’s code.
Abdoul Rasnab said he wanted to support us and committed to providing a portion of the sales of devices. We had no formal business deal. He didn’t need a commercial license to use GrapheneOS. We thought it was someone being generous, although he didn’t end up sending most of it.
Abdoul Rasnab repeatedly misrepresented himself as a creator or founder of GrapheneOS on LinkedIn and elsewhere. He repeatedly agreed to stop but never followed through. Later, we found out he built his whole business around misrepresenting himself as having created GrapheneOS.
He used GrapheneOS as the name for his proprietary fork of GrapheneOS and also named his company founded in the Netherlands GrapheneOS. He didn’t have authorization to do this and was misleading us about what he was doing and how he was presenting his involvement in GrapheneOS.
He took advantage of the fact that we were incredibly busy and under huge pressure from attacks by Copperhead. He acted as if he was supporting us while actually taking advantage of us and pretending he had created the open source project he didn’t write 1 line of code in.
He did multiple interviews in Dutch with media in the Netherlands where he misrepresented himself as being the founder and creator of GrapheneOS. He told his customers he was the creator of GrapheneOS and that devices running a fork from him were using the official GrapheneOS.
To this day, Abdoul Rasnab misrepresents himself as a founder of GrapheneOS. He even portrays himself as being actively involved in the project. He makes many extraordinarily claims about himself unrelated to GrapheneOS which help to contextualize the claims about GrapheneOS.
His proprietary fork of GrapheneOS and his company both wrongly reusing the name of the project he forked only existed from around 2018 through 2021. The part that’s still ongoing is that he keeps reverting back to promoting himself by claiming to have founded GrapheneOS.
Back in 2018, we renamed CopperheadOS to the Android Hardening Project as a placeholder and told people we were deciding on a new name. Abdoul Rasnab was one of multiple people who suggested GrapheneOS as a name. He seems to think that somehow made into his project post-rename.
We ended up having to purchase the grapheneos.com domain including the rights to the name. Run a WHOIS or RDAP check on grapheneos.com and you’ll see it was registered in 2014. There was also a name collision with an academic project which renamed themselves.
The person who sold us the grapheneos.com domain with the original rights to the name only charged us around $500 to cover their costs along with wanting a phone running GrapheneOS and accepted an old used one. It’s possible they’re now a GrapheneOS and supporter.
Abdoul Rasnab misrepresented himself as creating and founding the project in order to gain an advantage over other companies selling devices with GrapheneOS. He had conflicts with those companies and he did things such as filing DMCA takedowns in our name without authorization.
He created a proprietary fork of GrapheneOS and founded a company selling phones with it in Europe. He was allowed to fork GrapheneOS and sell it but absolutely shouldn’t have used the same name as the upstream project. He’s passing this off as having created/founded GrapheneOS.
Abdoul Rasnab previously tried to extort us by coming up with fabricated stories about us and claiming he would ruin our reputation pushing those in the media. He backed down and he once again stopped wrongly calling himself a founder of the project but now he’s back to doing it.
Abdoul Rasnab has created a website filled with AI slop where he claims to have discovered a bunch of severe vulnerabilities and claims credit for hacking multiple companies. He’s once again falsely claiming to have founded GrapheneOS on this website:
Cybernews is a content farm presenting their coverage of information security as being investigative journalism and security research. We’ve previously debunked a story from them involving the Pixel 9 which was heavily spread by other news publications:
Cybernews has taken AI slop content from Abdoul Rasnab’s site claiming credit for hacking a company and published it on their site, which is now being spread by other news sites:
https://cybernews.com/security/ajax-silenced-hacker-2017-data-breach/
This is the state of journalism in 2026. It’s why we’ve posted this thread.
Abdoul Rasnab spent a year in prison in Spain which brought an end to his proprietary fork of GrapheneOS pretending to be the original project and his company selling it. We don’t know the details. He claims he didn’t commit a crime and was found to be innocent. It’s possible.
We heard from several people who knew Abdoul Rasnab that the reason for his arrest and imprisonment while awaiting trial was him pretending to have committed crimes to impress a woman who turned out to be a police informant. That sounds a lot like what he’s doing right now.
Abdoul’s site claims he’s responsible for major data breaches even including the 2014 celebrity nude photo leaks tied to iCloud. Abdoul has previously duped Dutch podcasts and news sites including Tweakers.net into publishing content claiming he founded GrapheneOS.
Take a look at Abdoul’s site and expand the section on data breaches where he claims credit for a bunch of them. We have direct experience with 2 years of him pretending to be supportive while building a business around pretending to be our project. This is simply how he rolls.
We’re drawing attention to this because we’re concerned about Abdoul Rasnab’s fabrications about involvement in GrapheneOS and his supposed hacking achievements being leveraged in state attacks on GrapheneOS. He’s making himself a useful idiot for authoritarians slandering us.
We need help from people in the Netherlands to get Tweakers to investigate their past story where they were duped by Abdoul Rasnab into believing he founded GrapheneOS. They should take it down and issue a formal retraction. Slop farms including Cybernews are unlikely to do much.
These journalists seriously need to take a close look at Abdoul Rasnab’s website where he claims to be responsible for the 2014 celebrity nude leaks involving iCloud and much more. His claims are clearly false. How is the Dutch media getting duped into repeating his stories?
This isn’t limited to tech news sites passing themselves off as credible sources. Here’s one of the major Dutch news sites publishing his claims:
https://www.bnr.nl/nieuws/tech-innovatie/10597115/ajaxstopteomvangrijkdatalekuit-2017-in-de-doofpot
We’ve attached some screenshots of claimed achivements on Abdoul’s website at https://aquax.nl/.
Abdoul said he would donate a portion of the money from each device he sold to GrapheneOS but didn’t end up providing most of it. Despite that, he later tried to extort us claiming he’d invested money and was owed returns. GrapheneOS isn’t a business and has no shareholders.
We allowed him to make a fork and sell devices with it but he thoroughly misrepresented that as being GrapheneOS behind our backs. He took advantage of the language barrier and our lack of awareness about Dutch media along with us being occupied by the attacks from Copperhead.
He was selling devices by misrepresenting his involvement and was going after other companies selling devices with GrapheneOS based on claiming to have created it. He donated a small portion of the sales to GrapheneOS, but the way he earned it money caused substantial harm to us.
We’ve had to deal with an outrageous amount of nonsense over the years. There are two entirely separate people who have been falsely taking credit for our work for years. This guy getting arrested stopped it from proceeding further. It’s hard to know how bad it would have been.