On Wednesday, Motherboard showed how powerful off-the-shelf, $170 spyware really is. For a day, I used a piece of software on my phone to surreptitiously collect GPS location data, intercept phone calls, and silently steal photos.
Although a hacker can only infect a phone if they have physical access to the device, the threat from this type of malware is very real. It is heavily used by, and marketed towards, jealous lovers to spy on their spouses. For around two decades, people have used spyware for this purpose, with many cases ending up in violence or even murder.
What can potential victims of this type of surveillance do to check if they're being monitored? What are some of the best practices to keep in mind to make installing the malware harder? And what can those who are certainly being spied on do?
Unfortunately, this is actually one of the harder information security threats to reliably give advice for.
"The threat model against this is very complicated because you don't know really how much private space the abuse victim has," Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Motherboard in a phone call.
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