How we uncovered the identity of popular spyware makers

It's great that at least some shady businesses are being exposed. However, the problem is that it's hard to get any public attention on it - they are relatively small, and it's hard to link any actual damage to these shady businesses, and even then, the victims are "spread out", and will find it difficult to litigate.

There's no pressure to stop such businesses, unless law enforcement do their thing properly. FBI and other gov't agencies have massive resources, why isn't more put on this sort of thing, instead of spying on the citizens illegally?

Re: How we uncovered the identity of popular spyware makers

#5

Post by buro9 » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 11:36 AM UTC

> The UK address. 145-157 St John Street, London, EC1V 4PY. According to a BBC report, this is the address used by a company which sells its use as a registered office address. Because there does not seem to be an obligation to check that users of the service are legitimate companies, criminals are attracted to it. According to the BBC, the address is in common use among fake companies operating "boiler room" fake share scams.

That is the old address for Companies Made Simple: http://www.companiesmadesimple.com/

They handle all kinds of services for tens of thousands of companies in the UK, from registration, to registered address and mail forwarding.

I know this, because I used them for my startup to handle the registered address. This is because official mail has to go somewhere and the address is a matter of public record. We were in a co-working space at the time and knew that we would move on when the time came, it's an annoyance to go around updating the registered address and unprofessional to have a co-working space as one.

That Companies Made Simple is used by bad actors isn't going to be a surprise, bad actors use nearly all service providers.

They are the largest provider of registered address services in the UK, it's not a surprise that the address is in "common use". That ignores the fact that the number of legitimate businesses that use the address vastly outnumber the illegitimate.

I dislike Companies Made Simple having used them (they nearly shredded our investors SEIS certs because they didn't regard them as "official government communication"), but it's probably defamation to imply that companies using the address are not legitimate just because some small sample of them are not.

Re: How we uncovered the identity of popular spyware makers

#6

Post by fasteo » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 11:47 AM UTC

Great write-up, even though some enthusiastic conclusions are far from solid.

>>>> the logo similarity convinced us beyond the shadow of a doubt that Mobisoft LTD is the development company behind mSpy

>>>> Why would mSpy move their data from Amazon ... Incidentally, in September 2014, the FBI has arrested a CEO of another spyware company called Stealth Genie ... Could the ease with which the US authorities were able to take down Stealth Genie has caused the Ukrainian company to move to an alternative infrastructure? We believe that the compelling answer to this question is obvious. Yes.

Re: How we uncovered the identity of popular spyware makers

#7

Post by wongarsu » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 11:53 AM UTC

buro9 wrote: post #5

> The UK address. 145-157 St John Street, London, EC1V 4PY. According to a BBC report, this is the address used by a company which sells its use as a registered office address. Because there does not seem to be an obligation to check that users of the service are legitimate companies, criminals are attracted to it. According to the BBC, the address is in common use among fake companies operating "boiler room" fake sh…

To be fair, they never implied that a sizable portion of businesses using that address are illegitimate (though some people will read it that way). If I say "Twitter is in common use among ISIS members" that doesn't mean that most twitter users are ISIS members.

Re: How we uncovered the identity of popular spyware makers

#8

Post by newuser88273 » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 11:57 AM UTC

So this outfit, mSpy, sold to people the capability to track activities on one (1) other person's smartphone: Less than a nanogoogle! Why the outrage?

Re: How we uncovered the identity of popular spyware makers

#9

Post by buro9 » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 12:00 PM UTC

wongarsu wrote: post #7

buro9 wrote: post #5

> The UK address. 145-157 St John Street, London, EC1V 4PY. According to a BBC report, this is the address used by a company which sells its use as a registered office address. Because there does not seem to be an obligation to check that users of the service are legitimate companies, criminals are attracted to it. According to the BBC, the address is in common use among fake companies operating "boiler room" fake sh…

To be fair, they never implied that a sizable portion of businesses using that address are illegitimate (though some people will read it that way). If I say "Twitter is in common use among ISIS members" that doesn't mean that most twitter users are ISIS members.

That's true, they just cited someone else who were less careful: http://interfraud.org/ni_british_connection.htm

But even the source is incorrect. For registered address services you do have to verify company details.

It is only for generic mail forwarding services that you do not have to verify company details.

The difference being that the former is required to help disambiguate mail address to company officials from official government offices, and to ensure successful routing of mail to the correct person (failure to deliver mail from HMRC can result in substantial fines which would be a liability for Companies Made Simple).

The latter is no different from any mail box or mail forwarding service.

It seems that the anti-fraud organisation cited hasn't actually used the service and is unaware of the difference in proof required by them.

Re: How we uncovered the identity of popular spyware makers

#10

Post by kpcyrd » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 12:02 PM UTC

> After the first shock of seeing iCloud passwords stored in clear text(how hard would it be to encrypt them?)

Not going to defend shady businesses, but I dislike this knee jerk reaction without understanding the actual issue. I've seen software that encrypts (encrypts, not hashes) passwords for security™, but stores the secret in the database, too. Sure, technically they didn't store plaintext passwords, but practically they did.

What you could do to defend the passwords:

* hash them - doesn't work in this case, because it's not an authentication system

* symmetrically encrypt them - useless, the secret would be stored on the compromised server

* asymmetrically encrypt them - works, assuming the private key isn't stored on the server. Therefore, it's not possible to decrypt the passwords from within the application again