Kaspersky sees a drastic drop in Stalkerware, approximately 67 per cent in India

The number of users that encountered at least one so-called stalkerware (commercial spyware often used as a tool for domestic espionage) installation attempt surpassed 37,000 in the first eight months of 2019 (from January to August 2019). This is a 35 per cent increase globally when compared to figures for the same period in 2018. What’s more, the threat landscape for stalkerware has widened, as Kaspersky has discovered 380 variants of stalkerware in the wild in 2019 – 31 per cent more than a year ago. These are the major findings of Kaspersky’s The State of Stalkerware in the 2019 report.

So-called Stalkerware programs carry the possibility for intrusion into a person’s private life. By using them, an abuser can access their victim’s messages, photographs, social media, geolocation, and audio or camera recordings (in some cases, this can be done in real-time). Unlike legitimate parental control apps, such programs run hidden in the background, without a victim’s knowledge or consent. They are often promoted as software for spying on people’s partners.

In the first eight months of 2019, 37,532 unique users were targets of at least one attempt to infiltrate their device with stalkerware. In comparison, the figure for 2018 was 27,798 unique users. While these numbers may seem smaller than figures for other malware types (for example this equals only nine percent of users attacked by financial threats detected in H1 2019), it is important to keep in mind that unlike most consumer threats, stalkerware is typically used through specifically targeting victims. Stalkerware often needs to be installed manually on the victim's phone, so the abuser needs physical access to the device.

What’s more, further variations of stalkerware have become available on the market. In the first eight months of 2018, Kaspersky detection technologies spotted 290 potentially dangerous variants, in 2019 that number has grown by almost a third, to reach 380. This change was accompanied by the notable increase in the number of events when Kaspersky products detected the software in question on user devices: in 2019 it increased by 373 per cent, reaching 518,223.