If you suspect that you or one of your clients is the subject of illegal cell phone tracking, you call to complete a full cellular forensics analysis on the phone. Did you realize that we have to look at two different types of data on the phone?
We look at the physical data and the logical data.
Let me explain the difference.
The physical data would things like apps and the actual software that is on the phone. It’s generally data and information that the user doesn’t have a direct connection to like the actual code, the operating system or files in the operating system. It’s all that “stuff” that a developer would create to make programs function. The user doesn’t normally have access to that.
However, the physical data is extremely vulnerable to attack. The more complex it is and the fact that it tells the system how to work opens up the amount of data that is available. Really, it’s like the circulatory or nerve system in the human body. If you want to really damage or control something, you to access the most far-reaching systems like blood or nerves. It’s the same with computers including your cell phone.
The logical data is what most people think of when they think about cell phone surveillance. What do people seek when they are spying? Communications and logistics. Things like listening in on conversations and what is said, texts and e-mails or maybe locations provided with GPS.
With cell phone spyware, things like texts and e-mails are sent to the bad guy so they get exact duplicates of what the phone owner gets. The spyware is usually controlled by web-based programming and it commands the phone to do whatever they say. Of course that depends on the features of the software and what they want to access – at the point it’s on the phone – it’s up to them.
They call the phone and it doesn’t even ring, but it listens to their commands and just like a geni, does their bidding.
-Brenda McGinley, CEO, All in Investigations, All in Investigations
