The Hunt — Part III — Phone Breaker Technology
Weapons of Choice
Forty percent of domestic abuse victims are being stalked using spyware apps available for as little as £30 pounds. They can track a person’s location and any conversations within hearing distance, can be heard via their phone’s microphone Photos, emails and call logs can be uploaded to cloud storage and made visible to subscribers via a website. The apps can be hidden or made hard to detect by disguising them as digital photo apps or other types of file. Still the software has to be installed on a device by somebody who can get direct access to the phone. Intrusive parents and jealous spouses are the known market.
Another product for £200 pounds will break your phone password, allowing free access for anybody who can part your phone from you for a reasonable length of time. In the Gym perhaps. Sold as a tool for phone repair technicians, there is no control on it’s distribution, either at point of sale or point of purchase.
Is that a man or wolf standing next to me?
Another even more dangerous product, can break into a phone via wireless or bluetooth. They are designed to create a copy of all available data and do not need any software or hardware installation on the picked device. They include password breakers and encryption breakers.
They can be purchased in dozens of countries and used anywhere there is a person with a phone to exploit, The international market in surveillance technology is exploding with little control or oversight. Explicitly sold to law enforcement agencies, however there is little real visibility or understanding of how these are actually being distributed and used outside legitimate law enforcement.
The Hunter
“He went on two legs, wore clothes and was a human being, but nevertheless he was in reality a wolf of the Steppes. He had learned a good deal . . . and was a fairly clever fellow” — Steppenwolf — Herman Hesse
Most people’s perception of data thieves, is of high tech protagonists who are using skills, that require investment and intelligence, which most people do not have. The reality is far different, as long as the trade is unregulated and the software and hardware is not built to withstand theft or misuse. Any person with the ability to handle a smart phone is skilled enough to carry out mischief. Current statistics on misuse focus on the petty criminal, the person likely to be caught. However these tools can magnify the ability to carry out all other crimes. Burglary to Insider trading, Terrorism to auto-theft, many of which will go completely undetected.
Possible Steps To Protection
Research that needs to be done:
1) Who sells the software and hardware, including government agencies and private companies?
2) What is the proliferation, how many units have been sold to whom?
3) What evidence is there of misuse of software and hardware in police agencies, are they actively capturing this data and doing checks on criminal phones etc, similar to weapons checks.
4) Using which manufacturers hardware and software has been been found to be misused?
5) Is software and hardware being cloned and whose software and hardware is susceptible to this?
6) What identify checks are done of buyers?
7) What security is in place that the software and hardware can not be misappropriated?
8) What tracking is done of the subsequent movement of the software and hardware once it has moved from the purchaser to the purchased?
9) Are laws strong enough to make sure that this software and hardware can not be used to access phones without due process of law.
10) How is the copied data kept safe from further cloning and distribution?
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Helpful feedback, will be welcome.
