Hi and welcome to malicious life I'm Ran Levy. I know you're probably waiting for part two of our mini series on the gozy malware.

We're working on it and it will be ready for next week. In the meantime we wanted to give you

something extra to listen to. So a recent episode of our podcast focused on spyware, software

sold to governments, militaries, as well as ordinary people for the purpose of

covertly spying on somebody else's electronic devices.

As part of that episode, Nate Nelson, our senior producer who you've

probably heard before speaking in the podcast, interviewed Laudrina Churney, an expert in stockerware.

We only ended up using a small part of her interview, so as a bonus for those of you who are

interested in hearing more about spyware, here is the full conversation Nate had with Lordrina, on what

spyware is, how it works, who sells it, and how you can avoid it yourself. Enjoy the interview.

Lodrina can you introduce

Lodrina can you introduce yourself for our listeners?

My name is Lodrena Churney.

I'm a digital forensics instructor for the Sans Institute

and a product manager at Cyber Reason. Can I start off by asking you simply what is Stalkerware?

Okay, so, Stalkerware is software that can track somebody using a device.

Typically we're talking about some kind of tracking

that is not consensual by the person being tracked.

So this could come in two different forms.

We could be talking about legitimate software,

something like Google Maps where you might be sharing your location with somebody.

And while Google Maps is a legitimate program, the way that it's used, for example, if I'm sharing my location on my phone,

...