Cocospy stalkerware apps go offline after data breach

A trio of phone surveillance apps, which was caught spying on millions of people’s phones earlier this year, has gone offline. Cocospy, Spyic, and Spyzie were three near-identical but differently branded stalkerware apps that allowed the person planting one of the apps on a target’s phone access to their personal data — including their messages, photos, call logs, and real-time location data — usually without that person’s knowledge. Stalkerware apps, like Cocospy and its clones, are designed to stay hidden from device home screens, making the apps difficult to detect by their victims but all the while making the phone’s contents continually available to the person who planted the app. In February, a security researcher told TechCrunch that the apps share the same security flaw that allowed anyone to access the personal data of any device with one of the apps installed. The flaw also revealed the scale of the spying operations behind these apps by exposing the email address of every ... Read full article.