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Once upon a time, I found this company's software on an employee's work laptop, installed by a jealous ex-boyfriend. I called the company, and they refused to
by somejerk123 7y ago
Once upon a time, I found this company's software on an employee's work laptop, installed by a jealous ex-boyfriend.
I called the company, and they refused to remove our data or even help with uninstalling the software without a court order.
The software helpfully logged the URL when it saved screenshots to S3, which it did every few seconds.
The S3 bucket was fully public, listable, readable, writable. It also contained keylogging and other data.
Not just from our employee. From everyone.
- nkrisc 7y agoDid the data spontaneously delete itself?
- matheusmoreira 7y agoDid you get a court order?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- koolba 7y agoCould you overwrite the existing data?
- derefr 7y agoPerhaps you should have just sent the link to the S3 bucket to a news organization. Things would have handled themselves from there.
- somejerk123 7y agoBetween the red text on all their sites and this settlement, I'd say things did handle themselves. The employee and jealous ex even made up, got married, and have children now. Everybody lived happily ever after.
- heavenlyblue 7y ago>> The employee and jealous ex even made up, got married, and have children now. /s if not for the app, that ex would never be able to get over their jealousy
- nitwit005 7y agoYou could report them to AWS for violating the acceptable use policy. They have a line in there about interception: https://aws.amazon.com/aup/ https://aws.amazon.com/aup/
- meowface 7y agoPeople need to stop calling it (just) stalkerware and call it what it obviously is: malware. It's no different from any other form of malware. Just the criminals are probably people you know rather than online opportunists.
- Dylan16807 7y agoI think 'stalkerware' sounds much worse, so I'm not sure how that helps.
- meowface 7y agoThat's why I added the "just". Call it stalkerware for the general public, and malware in a criminal or technical context.
- peteretep 7y agoYou seem to think that "malware" sounds worse and somehow more specific than "stalkerware". Stalkerware sounds like a more nefarious subset of malware, and I'm not sure what conflating a more specific term into a less specific one achieves
- segfaultbuserr 7y agowhy not just "spyware"? Am I getting too old?
- peteretep 7y agoCould do. I guess I’d associate that with mass surveillance against many targets who aren’t know to the attacker? Stalkerware felt sufficiently evocative
- kingbirdy 7y agoDifferent connotations, I think - I don't consider spyware to be targeted, it's more of a "send it to everyone and hope you get some juicy info on someone", whereas stalkerware makes it clear it's for specifically targeting individuals.
- pjc50 7y agoThese days I would hope the GDPR big hammer could be brought to bear on such cases. (Also, you could make the argument that installing such software on someone else's work laptop constitutes IP theft and/or breach of local computer security laws...)