In terms of security threats to the Android ecosystem, Malware is just part of the problem. In fact, there are many apps that are neither true malware nor should have a place on the Google Play Store. Stalkerware exploits vulnerabilities to hide in a smartphone and spy on text messages, calls, photos and other data from there.
In some cases, we can relatively understand the use of this type of app to closely monitor interactions with children, for example. However, according to the presentation made by some developers, We clearly understand that these apps are more likely to be used illegally to spy on adults. This can range from suspicion of adultery to control and manipulation.
ESET is concerned about the resurgence of stalkerware in 2020
And there’s actually no protection whatsoever. ESET researcher Lukas Stefanko recently published telemetry data showing the extent of the incident. And best of all, there was a strong increase in the use of these applications a few months ago in 2020, and this increase has continued into 2021.
According to Lukas Stefanko Most developers of these apps pay little attention to user security risks :“Stalkerware clearly encourages ethically questionable behavior, at the very least, and this is what drives most antivirus programs to report them as spam or dangerous,” comments the researcher.
And to continue: “But given how these apps access, collect, store and transmit more information than other apps that victims install, we wanted to know how well these apps protect that data.
As you can guess, The security of these apps is a disaster. Of the 58 trackers analysed, 158 security issues were discovered – sometimes without encryption, data remaining on servers when it should have been deleted – not to mention bugs linked to code injection… the list goes on.
All of these security issues have been passed on to the authors of this tracking software. However, ESET states that 44 of them did not even bother to respond to the ESET report.
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