james o'sullivan / projects / nuke from orbit
Phone theft is about more than the device. It's your financial and reputational data that is the real risk. Current security measures don't work reliably for stolen phones, so we created Nuke From Orbit. With Nuke you can securely and instantly invalidate credentials stored on a stolen phone.
In April 2023 my phone went missing on a night out in Dublin. By the time I got home my Apple password had already been changed, so I could neither track the device nor reset anything, and the emails arriving told me the cards in my Apple Pay wallet were being used. It took about six hours on the phone to banks and through account recovery flows to shut everything down. Tens of thousands of pounds had gone before I got there.
The handset was the least of it. A modern phone is the key to your bank, your email, your identity and your reputation, and the recovery tools built into it quietly assume you still have the phone in your hand. I went looking for a break glass option and could not find one worth using. If it caught me out, someone less comfortable with the technology stands no chance at all.
Nuke From Orbit is that missing option. You register your cards, SIMs, apps and online accounts in advance, so the work is done while everything is calm. If the phone is taken, you log in from any other device and hit Nuke, and it all goes at once rather than sequentially over an afternoon.
The obvious hole is that the phone was your other device. That is what the network feature is for: people you trust hold their own Nuke accounts, and with your unique PIN they can select your name and trigger it on your behalf. Partner venues will be able to offer the same, so help is at hand even if you are on your own.
Deliberately, Nuke cannot order you replacement cards or SIMs, and it will never show you a password. It is a one-way switch. Once you are back on your feet you contact your issuers and use the normal reset flows. That is a nuisance, but a much smaller one than the alternative.
I founded the company in the summer of 2023, raised a pre-seed round, and built a team out from there. Most of the work since has been the patient business of partnering with banks, card issuers and mobile networks, because a kill switch is only as useful as the institutions that honour it. That process is still winding its way forward.