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posted by chromas on Friday August 24 2018, @08:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the cloud dept.

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.

Source: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kmj4v/spyware-company-spyfone-terabytes-data-exposed-online-leak


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @09:27PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @09:27PM (#726033)

    Is this some shit marketed to parents to install on their kids' phones? If so, how much CP is stored out in the open on Amazon?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @10:39PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @10:39PM (#726056)

    But they have to install it to protect the children, you can't be too safe!

    • (Score: 3, Touché) by MostCynical on Saturday August 25 2018, @12:08AM

      by MostCynical (2589) on Saturday August 25 2018, @12:08AM (#726089) Journal

      Nothing to hide, othing to be afraid of.

      Well, now they have nothing that isn't hidden. Close enough!

      --
      "I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex