75,000 Phones Freed from Stalking Spyware by Good Samaritan Hackers
According to a report from TechCrunch, hackers who remain unidentified have allegedly breached the spyware company WebDetetive and erased device data in order to safeguard individuals from being monitored. As a result, users of this spyware will not receive any fresh information from their intended targets. The hackers expressed their motive in a note obtained by TechCrunch, stating, “Because #fuckstalkerware.”
Spyware gives users unfettered access to a victim’s device, whether it’s a government using it to monitor citizens or an abuser using it to stalk a survivor. The spyware advertises the ability to monitor everything a victim writes, listen to phone calls, and monitor locations “less than a cup of coffee” without seeing. It works by downloading an app to a person’s phone under an undetectable alias and gives full access to the device. According to the hackers, the WebDetetive breach compromised more than 76,000 devices of stalkerware customers and more than 1.5 gigabytes of data was released from the application’s servers.
While TechCrunch did not independently confirm the removal of the victim’s data from the WebDetetive server, the data cache shared by the hackers offered a glimpse of what they managed to accomplish. TechCrunch also worked with DDoSecrets, a nonprofit that logs exposed datasets, to verify and analyze the data. The hackers obtained information about their customers, such as IP addresses and the devices they had targeted.
