Hacked, leaked, exposed: Why you should never use stalkerware apps

 

There is a whole shady industry for people who want to monitor and spy on their families. Multiple app makers market their software — sometimes referred to as stalkerware — to jealous partners who can use these apps to access their victims’ phones remotely. 

Yet, despite how sensitive this data is, an increasing number of these companies are losing huge amounts of it. 

According to TechCrunch’s tally, counting the latest data leak of Spyzie, which comes shortly after the data exposures of Cocospy and Spyic, there have been at least 24 stalkerware companies since 2017 that are known to have been hacked, or leaked customer and victims’ data online. That’s not a typo: At least 24 stalkerware companies have either been hacked or had a significant data exposure in recent years. And four stalkerware companies were hacked multiple times. 

Spyzie, Cocospy, and Spyic are the first stalkerware companies in 2025 to have inadvertently exposed sensitive data. The two surveillance operations left messages, photos, call logs, and other personal and sensitive data of millions of victims exposed online, according to a security researcher who found a bug that allowed them to access that data. 

The makers of Spyzie exposed 518,643 unique email addresses of their customers. In the case of Cocospy, the company leaked 1.81 million customer email addresses, and Spyic leaked 880,167 customer email addresses. That’s a total of more than 3.2 million email addresses, after removing duplicate addresses that appeared in both breaches, according to an analysis by Troy Hunt, who runs data breach notification site Have I Been Pwned.   

In 2024, there were at least four massive stalkerware hacks. The last stalkerware breach in 2024 affected Spytech, a little-known spyware maker based in Minnesota, which exposed activity logs from the phones, tablets, and computers monitored with its spyware. Before that, there was a breach at mSpy, one of the longest-running stalkerware apps, which exposed millions of customer support tickets, which included the personal data of millions of its customers. 

Previously, an unknown hacker broke into the servers of the U.S.-based stalkerware maker pcTattletale. The hacker then stole and leaked the company’s internal data. They also defaced pcTattletale’s official website with the goal of embarrassing the company. The hacker referred to a recent TechCrunch article where we reported pcTattletale was used to monitor several front desk check-in computers at a U.S. hotel chain. 

As a result of this hack, leak and shame operation, pcTattletale founder Bryan Fleming said he was shutting down his company.

Consumer spyware apps like mSpy and pcTattletale are commonly referred to as “stalkerware” (or spouseware) because jealous spouses and partners use them to surreptitiously monitor and surveil their loved ones. These companies often explicitly market their products as solutions to catch cheating partners by encouraging illegal and unethical behavior. And there have been multiple court cases, journalistic investigations and surveys of domestic abuse shelters that show that online stalking and monitoring can lead to cases of real-world harm and violence. 

And that’s why hackers have repeatedly targeted some of these companies.

Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a leading researcher and activist who has investigated and fought stalkerware for years, said the stalkerware industry is a “soft target.” 

“The people who run these companies are perhaps not the most scrupulous or really concerned about the quality of their product,” Galperin told TechCrunch.

Given the history of stalkerware compromises, that may be an understatement. And because of the lack of care for protecting their own customers — and consequently the personal data of tens of thousands of unwitting victims — using these apps is doubly irresponsible. The stalkerware customers may be breaking the law, abusing their partners by illegally spying on them, and, on top of that, putting everyone’s data in danger.

A history of stalkerware hacks

The flurry of stalkerware breaches began in 2017 when a group of hackers breached the U.S.-based Retina-X and the Thailand-based FlexiSpy back to back. Those two hacks revealed that the companies had a total number of 130,000 customers all over the world.

At the time, the hackers who — proudly — claimed responsibility for the compromises explicitly said their motivations were to expose and hopefully help destroy an industry that they consider toxic and unethical.

“I’m going to burn them to the ground, and leave absolutely nowhere for any of them to hide,” one of the hackers involved then told Motherboard. 

Referring to FlexiSpy, the hacker added: “I hope they’ll fall apart and fail as a company, and have some time to reflect on what they did. However, I fear they might try and give birth to themselves again in a new form. But if they do, I’ll be there.”

Despite the hack, and years of negative public attention, FlexiSpy is still active today. The same cannot be said about Retina-X.

The hacker who broke into Retina-X wiped its servers with the goal of hampering its operations. The company bounced back — and then it got hacked again a year later. A couple of weeks after the second breach, Retina-X announced that it was shutting down. 

Just days after the second Retina-X breach, hackers hit Mobistealth and Spymaster Pro, stealing gigabytes of customer and business records, as well as victims’ intercepted messages and precise GPS locations. Another stalkerware vendor, the India-based SpyHuman, encountered the same fate a few months later, with hackers stealing text messages and call metadata, which contained logs of who called who and when. 

Weeks later, there was the first case of accidental data exposure, rather than a hack. Spy Fone left an Amazon-hosted S3 storage bucket unprotected online, which meant anyone could see and download text messages, photos, audio recordings, contacts, location, scrambled passwords and login information, Facebook messages, and more. All that data was stolen from victims, most of whom did not know they were being spied on, let alone know their most sensitive personal data was also on the internet for all to see. 

Other stalkerware companies that over the years have irresponsibly left customers’ and victims’ data online are Family Orbit, which left 281 gigabytes of personal data online protected only by an easy-to-find password; mSpy, which leaked over 2 million customer records in 2018; Xnore, which let any of its customers see the personal data of other customers’ targets, which included chat messages, GPS coordinates, emails, photos, and more; MobiiSpy, which left 25,000 audio recordings and 95,000 images on a server accessible to anyone; KidsGuard, which had a misconfigured server that leaked victims’ content; pcTattletale, which prior to its hack also exposed screenshots of victims’ devices uploaded in real time to a website that anyone could access; and Xnspy, whose developers left credentials and private keys in the apps’ code, allowing anyone to access victims’ data; and now Spyzie, Cocospy and Spyic, which left victims’ messages, photos, call logs, and other personal data, as well as customers’ email addresses, exposed online.

As far as other stalkerware companies that actually got hacked, there was Copy9, which saw a hacker steal the data of all its surveillance targets, including text messages and WhatsApp messages, call recordings, photos, contacts, and browser history; LetMeSpy, which shut down after hackers breached and wiped its servers; the Brazil-based WebDetetive, which also got its servers wiped, and then hacked again; OwnSpy, which provides much of the back-end software for WebDetetive, also got hacked; Spyhide, which had a vulnerability in its code that allowed a hacker to access the back-end databases and years of stolen data from around 60,000 victims; Oospy, which was a rebrand of Spyhide, shut down for a second time; and the latest mSpy hack, which is unrelated to the previously mentioned leak. 

Finally there is TheTruthSpy, a network of stalkerware apps, which holds the dubious record of having been hacked or having leaked data on at least three separate occasions.