Such was the case last year when a hacker wiped some servers of Florida-based Retina-X Studios, Motherboard reported. Vigilante hackers have been known to breach spyware applications, exposing their security flaws to the world. In another, counselors at a safe house for battered women in Minnesota had to call the police after a man used an app to track his wife to the shelter, according to NPR. In one case highlighted by the New York Times last year, a husband reportedly used an app to monitor his wife’s communication in the days before he murdered her. “They provide different offers for different needs, with tariffs ranging from half a dollar per day to $68/month.”

This made it clear that an ID can be permanently assigned to a specific computer.'Įikenberg reported his findings to Kaspersky, who acknowledged the issue and patched it just last month by assigning a constant value ( FD126C42-EBFA-4E12-B309-BB3FDD723AC1) for all users instead of using UUID in the JavaScript URL.“Forget Darkweb forums or underground markets, developers of these applications have built their own economic environment,” wrote Kaspersky’s Firsh. 'The IDs were persistent and did not change after several days. This means in plain language that any website can simply read the Kaspersky ID of the user and misuse it for tracking,' the researcher says.

'That's a bad idea because other scripts that run in the context of the website domain can access the HTML code at any time-and thus the injected Kaspersky ID. However, Eikenberg finds that the URL of this JavaScript file contains a string which is unique to every Kaspersky user, sort of a UUID (Universally Unique Identifier) that can easily be captured by websites, other third-party advertising and analytics services, putting its users privacy at risk. Well, it's no surprise, as most Internet security solutions work in the same way to monitor web pages for malicious content.

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