When Spyware Backfires

When Spyware Backfires

Hoisted by his own petard.

We were once called in for a site visit during a messy matrimonial matter. Our client discovered that there were hidden cameras in their family home and wanted a 360 review of her property - house, computers, tablets, phones and all. We discovered a lovely piece of commercial spyware on her home machine, which dumped screenshots, photos from the webcam, keypresses, accessed files, connected devices and other juicy morsels to an encrypted file.

We created a password database from the contents of the computer and let it chug on one of our beefy examiner machines. Two days later we successfully broke into the encrypted storage container and recovered photo evidence of the spouse entering the home (contravening the retraining order) and retrieving the logs via USB stick.

The client loved us. The spying spouse, not so much.