Spyware Demo Shows How Spooks Hack Mobile Phones

An anonymous reader writes: Joe Greenwood, of cybersecurity firm 4Armed, recently gave a live demonstration of some of Hacking Team's leaked spyware to the BBC. Tracking Bitcoin payments, recording audio from the microphone of a locked device, and secretly gaining control of an infected phone's camera are just a few of the software's capabilities. The BBC reports: "Both Mr Greenwood and 4Armed's technical director, Marc Wickenden, said they were surprised by the sleekness of the interface. Both point out, though, that customers could be paying upwards of £1m for the software and would expect it to be user-friendly, especially if it was intended for use by law enforcers on the beat. For the tracked user, though, there are very few ways of finding out that they are being watched. One red flag, according to Mr Greenwood, is a sudden spike in network data usage, indicating that information is being sent somewhere in the background. Experienced spies, however, would be careful to minimize this in order to remain incognito."

Comments

"... by law enforcers on the beat."

[Anonymous Coward]

... or in other words, foot patrol cops on a fishing expedition. Over and over again, the officials in our governments and law enforcement talk about how there are all these safeguards and how hard it is to use surveillance and time (Snowden) and time (Hacking Team crack) again the reality shows them for the lying autocrats that they are.

I wish someone would have made sure that Hacking Team, and other companies like them, no longer were in business permanently. Instead, we are leaning the other way, with "terrorism experts" saying that private companies should have their own equivalents of Internet armies.

captcha: warped

pick your poison

[superwiz]

Even if you do only send network traffic when there is a lot of other network traffic (to avoid obvious consistent network use), it means more buffering. Which means more memory/storage use. It's still detectable through purely statistical tools.