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: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @08:37PM (8 children)
In the Soviet UK, Halogen bans EU!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @09:01PM (3 children)
Ok who is running the shitty chat bot?? Either this person can't tell the difference between slashdot and soylentnews or it is a shitty bot.
Not sure I understand why someone would program a bot to post the above.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @09:10PM (2 children)
because it's not a bot and just was some dude that wasn't funny to you?
the internet is full of people that can be replaced with simple scripts, that doesnt mean they have benefitted from it yet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @09:24PM (1 child)
Incorrect, this joke is meant for slashdot which at this moment has the story 2nd from the top. The EU halogen ban story has not run on SN yet. I made that point already, am I arguing with a bot now?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @10:24PM
No, it just was some dude that wasn't that bright to you?
(Score: 2) by turgid on Friday August 24 2018, @09:44PM (3 children)
The UK isn't Soviet at the moment, it's fascist.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 25 2018, @02:57AM (2 children)
The distinction beyond ideological semantics between both systems is close to nil.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Saturday August 25 2018, @09:40AM (1 child)
They're completely different economically.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 25 2018, @12:20PM
In theory. In practice, all economic systems are the same; rich take everything, poor get shit on.