The CEO of a
Pakistani company has been indicted in the U.S. for selling a product
called StealthGenie that buyers could use to monitor calls, texts, videos and
other communications on other people's mobile phones, the U.S. Department of
Justice said.The indictment of Hammad Akbar, 31, of Lahore, Pakistan, represents the
first time the DOJ has brought a criminal case related to the marketing and
sale of an alleged mobile spyware app, the DOJ said in a press release Monday.
Akbar is CEO
of InvoCode, the company selling StealthGenie online. Akbar is among the
creators of StealthGenie, which could intercept communications to and from
mobile phones, including Apple, Android and BlackBerry devices, the DOJ said.
StealthGenie
was undetectable by most people whose phones it was installed on and was
advertised as being untraceable, the DOJ said.Akbar was charged in U.S. District Court for the
Eastern District of Virginia with conspiracy, sale of a surreptitious
interception device, advertisement of a known interception device, and
advertising a device as a surreptitious interception device. He was arrested in
Los Angeles on Saturday and is expected to appear before a magistrate judge in
the Central District of California late Monday.
"Selling
spyware is not just reprehensible, it's a crime," Leslie Caldwell,
assistant attorney general in the DOJ's Criminal Division, said in a statement.
"Apps
like StealthGenie are expressly designed for use by stalkers and domestic
abusers who want to know every detail of a victim's personal life -- all
without the victim's knowledge."
StealthGenie
was hosted at a data center in Ashburn, Virginia. On Friday, a federal judge in
the Eastern District of Virginia issued a temporary restraining order authorizing
the FBI to temporarily disable the website hosting StealthGenie. The
StealthGenie.com website remained down on Monday. StealthGenie allowed users to
target mobile phone owners and record all incoming and outgoing voice calls,
according to the indictment. It also allowed purchasers of the app to call the
phone and monitor all surrounding conversations within a 15-foot radius, and to
monitor the targeted user's incoming and outgoing email and text messages,
incoming voicemail, address book, calendar, photographs and videos.
Akbar
and his co-conspirators allegedly programmed StealthGenie to synchronize
communications intercepted by the app with the customer's account so that the
customer could review intercepted communications almost immediately from any computer
with access to the Internet, the DOJ alleged. To install the app, a purchaser
needed to obtain physical control over the phone to be monitored for only a few
minutes. Invocode's
target population for marketing the app was spouses, boyfriends and girlfriends
who suspected their partners of cheating, the DOJ said. Testimonials on the
StealthGenie website focused largely on potential purchasers who did not have
any ownership interest in the mobile phone to be monitored. Akbar and his
partners fabricated the testimonials, the DOJ alleged.
src: http://www.computerworld.com
No comments:
Post a Comment