It’s been less than a year since a public-spirited hacker
broke into the servers of Florida stalkerware vendor Retina-X, wiping
out all the photos and data the company’s customers had stolen from
other peoples’ phones (including their kids’ phones) by installing the
spying apps Phonesheriff on them.
Now, it’s happened again.
A hacker who uses the handle Precise Buffalo
on a Mastadon server says they wiped a terabyte of data from Retina-X’s
servers. Retina-X, who eventually admitted that they’d lied when they
denied last year’s attack, have denied that an attack took place this
year. Precise Buffalo presented compelling evidence to Motherboard that
they had indeed taken over Retina-X’s servers (again).
Last year’s breach was possible because Retina-X distributed the
necessary keys to download all its customers’ data with every copy of
its app, meaning that parents who used the app to spy on their children
also exposed their children to surveillance by everyone in the world.
