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Last year, a vigilante hacker broke into the servers of a company that sells spyware to everyday consumers and wiped their servers, deleting photos captured from monitored devices. A year later, the hacker has done it again.
Thursday, the hacker said he started wiping some cloud servers that belong to Retina-X Studios, a Florida-based company that sells spyware products targeted at parents and employers, but that are also used by people to spy on their partners without their consent.
[...] "None of this should be online at all," the hacker told Motherboard, claiming that he had deleted a total of 1 terabyte of data.
"Aside from the technical flaws, I really find this category of software disturbing. In the US, it's mainly targeted to parents," the hacker said, explaining his motivations for going after Retina-X. "Edward Snowden has said that privacy is what gives you the ability to share with the world who you are on your own terms, and to protect for yourself the parts of you that you're still experimenting with. I don't want to live in a world where younger generations grow up without that right."
[...] Retina-X was not the only spyware company hacked last year. Other hackers also breached FlexiSpy, an infamous provider of spyware that has actively marketed its apps to jealous lovers. At the time, the hackers promised that their two victims—FlexiSpy and Retina-X—were only the first in line, and that they would target more companies that sell similar products.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FakeBeldin on Wednesday February 21 2018, @01:28PM
I can. We (you, me, others here) shouldn't be building this stuff.
This is not some weird dictatorship in a far-off south-east Asian country. This is a Florida, USA based firm that makes spyware.
Computers are everywhere and are handling more and more of our daily lives. Those of us that have the knowledge to program these machines to do things, have an obligation to consider the impact of their work on society. Those of us who teach this knowledge, have a duty to teach our students to be able to recognise these situations, so that they can ask such questions of themselves, their company and their clients.