New Delhi: Recently, cybersecurity firm ‘Kaspersky’ gave out the list of top-10 nations affected by Stalkerware in 2020. The report which is called ‘State of Stalkerware 2020’ placed India at number four after Russia, Brazil, and USA.
Out of 53,870 total number of users affected, 4,627 were in India. The rise of stalkerware in India comes after the Minister of State for Home G Kishan Reddy “over 93,000 cybercrimes related to fraud, sexual exploitation and spreading of hate have been registered in the country between 2017 and 2019.”
Stalkerware is in form of a malicious app which is installed by a person who is close to the victim. The motive being secretly monitoring their activities through their phone, once it is installed, the other person can see photos, read messages, track geolocation and even listen to calls without one’s knowledge.
These apps are either available under fake names or they run in invisible mode which won’t show them in the app menu so that the victim cannot detect it. Stalkerware apps are easily accessible through APKs online or on third party app stores.
“We see the number of users affected by stalkerware has remained high and we detect new samples every day,” Victor Chebyshev, research development team lead, Kaspersky said in a statement.
Avast, another cybersecurity firm also said that starting from surge of stalkerware during the initial days of pandemic, globally the number of attacks remained high throughout 2020. Security experts at Avast predict that this trend will continue in 2021, but they don’t expect a sudden increase.
