Gamma Group, the world's most prominent surveillance company, is in the spotlight thanks to an anonymous
leaker who gained access to sensitive corporate documents. Documents detailing Gamma Group's spy tools shows that most smartphones can be hacked and spied on.
FinSpy, designed to help Law Enforcement and Intelligence Agencies to remotely monitor mobile phones and tablet devices, was used to determine if various smartphones can detect and resist snooping attempts on phone calls, contacts, and other data. The Gamma Group document captures a
list of OSes that FinSpy can exploit and create tunnels, which are:
- Android 2.x.x., 3.x.x, 4.0.x, 4.1.x, 4.2.x and 4.4.x
- Windows Mobile 6.1 and 6.5
- Symbian Belle, Symbian Anna, S60, v5.x and v3.x
- Blackberry 5.x, 6.x and 7.x
- iOS (only with untethered jailbreak) 4.3.x, 5.x, 6.x, 7.0.x
This spyware is able to breach smartphones running Android, Windows, Symbian, some Blackberry, but no iOS operating system. It looks like Apple knows what its doing with their level of security.
For FinSpy to hack into an iPhone, the phone's owner must have already stripped away much of its built-in security through a process called "jailbreaking." No jailbreak, no FinSpy on your iPhone, at least according to a leaked Gamma document dated April 2014.
It is also unclear as to whether FinSpy can breach the newer Blackberry BB10 operating system based off of QNX. As far as we know, older Blackberry's and Android smartphones are most vulnerable to such attacks.
