If you are looking for parental monitoring apps to protect your child from online dangers, you most likely assume that all apps are much the same. Most of us probably consider only product features and costs to make our buying decision — and that’s entirely understandable.
But have you ever thought about the company providing the software, what they do to protect your child’s data from the jungle that is the internet — a ‘war zone’ where websites are under constant attack from hackers? Have you considered the consequences of their servers being hacked and your child’s data is exposed to the world?
As you can see from a timeline of spy apps that have been hacked, security breaches happen more often than you may imagine— especially at the lower end of the market
| Date hacked | Company hacked | Type of data leaked | Affected Accounts |
|---|---|---|---|
| 22 May 2015 | mSpy | - Emails - text messages, payment details - Apple IDs - passwords, photos and location data | 400,000 accounts |
| April 27, 2017 | - Retina-X (includes, Mobile Spy, Sniper Spy, PhoneSheriff, TeenShield) | - GPS logs - Screenshots - Photos - Text messages - Emails - Contacts - Customer email addresses - Passwords | 130,000 + accounts |
| Feb, 2018 | TheTruthSpy | - Logins - audio recordings - Pictures - text messages - other data | 10,000 + accounts |
| Feb 17 2018 | - Retina-X (includes, Mobile Spy, Sniper Spy, PhoneSheriff, TeenShield) | All data stored in customer accounts | 1 + terabyte of data. |
| Feb 23 2018 | Spy Master Pro | - historical GPS locations - text messages | 10,000 + account (combined w/Mobistealth) |
| Feb 23 2018 | Mobistealth | - Business information - Customer records - Text messages | 10,000 + accounts (combined w/Spy Master Pro) |
| Jul 9, 2018 | SpyHuman | - Text messages - Call logs | 440,000,000 call details |
| Aug 30 2018 | Family Orbit | - Photos - Videos - Passwords | 281 gigabytes of data |
| September 18, 2018 | mSpy | - customer transactions - mobile phone data - username, password and private encryption key of each mSpy customer (last 6mo) - Apple iCloud username and authentication token of mobile devices - iCloud backup files - customer name - email address - mailing address - amount paid | Millions of records |
| August 26, 2018 | SpyFone | - Selfies - Text messages - Audio recordings - Contacts - Locations - Hashed passwords & logins - Facebook messages - And more | 44,109 accounts |
As the timeline above shows, this hacking scenario is much more common than you may think — and it’s not just because of the volume of threats — it also depends on the quality of the company’s security measures.
Unfortunately, security measures suck up a huge amount of company resources because and — unlike feature development— security is an expensive, never-ending battle against an army of formidable enemies.
From the complexity of additional design, the expense of implementation and testing, and the internal processes required to detect and deal with hacking attempts — its little wonder that most parental monitoring application developers skip security. Done correctly, security adds 20% to development, support and maintenance costs which cut into profits
Skipping security makes the price of parental monitoring apps lower, makes development quicker and makes the product appealing to the customer. But there are real consequences to ignoring security, which is why so many parental monitoring software companies— particularly those at the lower end of the price scale— have been hacked.
FlexiSPY spends a lot on security, and while no company can claim to be hack proof— we are glad to say that FlexiSPY has never had any customer data hacked.
This is just another reason why we recommend FlexiSPY parental monitoring software to any parent who is concerned about their child’s safety. Click here to learn more