Tuesday, April 04, 2006

cellphone spyware part deux

so my last posting about cellphone spyware (flexispy) apparently was interesting enough to someone for them to send me my very first non-spam feedback... specifically, someone claiming to be affiliated with neo-call sent me a nice little email with their views on the flexispy story...

this is actually pretty amazing, because apparently the neo-call folks (being industry leaders) developed superior cellphone spying technology months ago and nobody paid any attention to them or talked about them (awwwww)... the email goes on to say that it's very interesting that f-secure picked up on the flexispy story a day after the software was released - and i agree... if it really was only a day after the software was released it would appear that vervata decided that getting a examined by anti-virus vendors would make for a good publicity stunt, and i suppose they may be right... on the other hand, f-secure now detects their product as a spyware trojan so i guess that kinda backfired on them since that detection is going to limit the marketability product (who wants to pay for spyware that an anti-virus product can already detect?)...

finally, the email finished off with a lament about how neo-call is an industry leader (in the field of cellphone spyware, apparently) and how it's a shame that nobody is paying any attention to them or talking about them at all.. clearly they're jealous of all the special lovin' the boys and girls and f-secure have been giving flexispy and they want in on some of that action - and it appears they may be deserving... their product forwards sms messages, lo-jack's the phone through GSM localization, and i gather there's even a bonus add-on for listening in on calls - definitely sounds spyware to me... oh, and get this, the FAQ clearly states that you can't tell the product is installed by examining the phone - yup, it fails to disclose it's true nature just like flexispy, isn't that wonderfully up-front of them to admit to it's trojan nature?

mikko and the rest of the gang at f-secure - these guys are obviously looking for some of your special attention, so go ahead and hook 'em up..

[edit april 7 2006: i don't know what i was thinking posting links to a malware distributor, i guess i must have been laughing too hard to realize what i was doing]

0 comments: