Submitted via IRC for SoyCow4408
A company that markets cell phone spyware to parents and employers left the data of thousands of its customers—and the information of the people they were monitoring—unprotected online.
The data exposed included selfies, text messages, audio recordings, contacts, location, hashed passwords and logins, Facebook messages, among others, according to a security researcher who asked to remain anonymous for fear of legal repercussions.
Last week, the researcher found the data on an Amazon S3 bucket owned by Spyfone, one of many companies that sell software that is designed to intercept text messages, calls, emails, and track locations of a monitored device.
[...] The researcher said that the exposed data contained several terabytes of "unencrypted camera photos."
"There's at least 2,208 current 'customers' and hundreds or thousands of photos and audio in each folder," he told Motherboard in an online chat. "There is currently 3,666 tracked phones."
The company's backend services were also left wide open, not requiring a password to log into them, according to the researcher, who said he was able to create admin accounts and see customer data.
Spyfone also left one of it's APIs completely unprotected online, allowing anyone who guesses the URL to read what appears to be an up-to-date and constantly updating list of customers. The site shows first and last names, email and IP addresses. As of Thursday, there were more than 11,000 unique email addresses in the database, according to a Motherboard analysis.
(Score: 5, Informative) by requerdanos on Friday August 24 2018, @08:33PM (3 children)
To be fair, their customers knew Spyfone's privacy position ("against it") when they agreed to become customers.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @09:08PM
I concur; there is no honor among those that profit from violating others.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @09:09PM (1 child)
What about their spouses etc who were exposed to the malware?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by requerdanos on Friday August 24 2018, @10:23PM
They were already victims of Spyfone and the "customer", now they are being victimized to a larger extent due to Spyfone's practices and the poor judgment of "customer".