Spyware Company Exposed Terabytes of Sensitive Images, Audio Recordings, and Web History Online

Spyware company Spyfone exposed terabytes of data that includes audio recordings, text messages, photos and web history from an unsecured Amazon S3 bucket.

Spyfone is a mobile phone monitoring application to monitor employees and Kid’s Smartphone activities Remotely. The information that they are monitoring is left unprotected online.

A security researcher spotted the unprotected Amazon S3 bucket belong’s to Spyfone. The researcher said Motherboard that the “exposed data contained several terabytes of unencrypted camera photos.”

According to the researcher the exposed Amazon S3 bucket contains selfies, text messages, audio recordings, contacts, location, hashed passwords and logins and Facebook messages. According to Troy Hunt who analyzed some of the data shared by the researcher, the exposed data also contains “44,109 unique email addresses”.

The Motherboard also verified that researcher access to the database by signing up for a trial account installed spyware on the phone and taking some pictures. Then hours later the researcher sent back the image to Motherboard to verify the access.

“The researcher said the exposed bucket contains terabytes of unencrypted camera photos and at least 2,208 current ‘customers’ and hundreds or thousands of photos and audio in each folder. There are currently 3,666 tracked phones.”

Also, the researcher said the company’s backend services are kept open without authentication and he was able to create an admin account to see the customer details, also their APIs left unprotected online.

Spyfone spoke’s person McBroom confirmed the leak affected approximately 2,200 customers and we have partnered with leading data security firms to assist in our investigation.

AWS permissions are crucial

AllUsers – Anyone by having the name can access the bucket.

AuthenticatedUsers – Allows only the privileged AWS account users can access the bucket.

Regardless of the size of the organization, anyone who uses cloud technology is subject to the risk of unintentional exposure. Amazon published an article on how to secure the files in my Amazon S3 bucket details the access restrictions.

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