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Spy Apps and Stalkerware with Special Guest Jeff Tang – WB40
This is your Shared Security Weekly Blaze for October 29th 2018 with your host, Tom Eston. In this week’s episode: Spy apps and Stalkerware with special guest Jeff Tang.
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Spy apps, or better known as “stalkerware”, are apps that can be used to track and spy on the activities that someone does on a mobile device. Activities can include everything from being able to read text messages, view photos, emails, see websites visited, track real-time GPS location, turn on the microphone or camera, view social media usage, and much more. These apps go by the names of mSpy, FlexiSPY, Retina-X, and many others that are widely available for purchase. While there may be legitimate purposes for installing an app like these, for example, parents that might want to track what their kids are doing on their mobile devices or employers monitoring company issued mobile phones; criminals as well as stalkers are also using these apps to conduct surveillance and monitoring of a victim’s device. These apps are very concerning for someone that might be in a domestic abuse situation or is being criminally stalked. In this episode we’re going to cover why these apps have become so popular, how they are installed and how you can detect if someone has installed one of these apps on your mobile device.
Tom Eston: Joining me to talk about spy apps and stalker-ware is Jeff Tang, who is the Senior Manager of Applied Research at Cylance. Welcome to the show, Jeff.
Jeff Tang: Hey Tom, thanks for having me.
Tom Eston: So what’s your take on these apps, and why do you think they’re becoming so popular?
Jeff Tang: I think there’s a lot of interest in these apps because we’re in a new society where we’re actually recording everything, and everything is becoming digital. Our entire lives are captured onto our cell phones from photos, to text messages, to emails, to just GPS location. And we’re in this age were all this data is now available, and I think we’re seeing the commoditization of the spying applications that take advantage of the availability of this data. So I think a lot of the popularity is just like this wasn’t possible before smartphones existed, it was much more difficult to try to capture someone’s location, but now we all carry a GPS device in our pockets.
Tom Eston: Yeah, I’m kind of reminded of… If you’re a fan of the Breaking Bad TV show where they put a GPS locator on somebody’s car and then they use a old style type of GPS tracker to follow the car around, right?
Jeff Tang: Yeah, and those are actually still really common, right? You can go on Amazon and buy them for as cheap as 20 bucks.
Tom Eston: So the technology has definitely evolved. So, is it just because we now have more power in our finger tips that it makes these apps a lot easier for people to use?
Jeff Tang: Yeah, I think it’s… We’ve all had kind of an inclination to know what’s going on. And now in 30 seconds we can go and search for something like this. And there are other vendors out there that are
Published on 7 years, 2 months ago