The spyware operation's exposed customer email addresses and passwords were shared with data breach notification service Have I Been Pwned.
A security vulnerability in a stealthy Android spyware operation called Catwatchful has exposed thousands of its customers, including its administrator.
The bug, which was discovered by security researcher Eric Daigle, spilled the spyware app’s full database of email addresses and plaintext passwords that Catwatchful customers use to access the data stolen from the phones of their victims.
Catwatchful is spyware masquerading as a child monitoring app that claims to be “invisible and cannot be detected,” all the while uploading the victim’s phone’s private contents to a dashboard viewable by the person who planted the app. The stolen data includes the victims’ photos, messages, and real-time location data. The app can also remotely tap into the live ambient audio from the phone’s microphone and access both front and rear phone cameras.
Spyware apps like Catwatchful are banned from the app stores and rely on being downloaded and planted by someone with physical access to a person’s phone. As such, these apps are commonly referred to as “stalkerware” (or spouseware) for their propensity to facilitate non-consensual surveillance of spouses and romantic partners, which is illegal.
Catwatchful is the latest example in a growing list of stalkerware operations that have been hacked, breached, or otherwise exposed the data they obtain, and is at least the fifth spyware operation this year to have experienced a data spill. The incident shows that consumer-grade spyware continues to proliferate, despite being prone to shoddy coding and security failings that expose both paying customers and unsuspecting victims to data breaches.
According to a copy of the database from early June, which TechCrunch has seen, Catwatchful had email addresses and passwords on more than 62,000 customers and the phone data from 26,000 victims’ devices.
Most of the compromised devices were located in Mexico, Colombia, India, Peru, Argentina, Ecuador, and Bolivia (in order of the number of victims). Some of the records date back to 2018, the data shows.
The Catwatchful database also revealed the identity of the spyware operation’s administrator, Omar Soca Charcov, a developer based in Uruguay. Charcov opened our emails, but did not respond to our requests for comment sent in both English and Spanish. TechCrunch asked if he was aware of the Catwatchful data breach, and if he plans to disclose the incident to its customers.
Without any clear indication that Charcov will disclose the incident, TechCrunch provided a copy of the Catwatchful database to data breach notification service Have I Been Pwned.
Following major public exposures by Insikt Group and others throughout the last two years, alongside US government sanctions targeting the Intellexa Consortium — the organizational structure behind the Predator mobile spyware — Insikt Group observed a significant decline in Predator-related activity. This apparent decline raised questions about whether the combination of US sanctions, public exposure, and broader international efforts to curb spyware proliferation, such as the UK and France-led Pall Mall process, had dealt a lasting blow to Intellexa’s operations. Yet, Predator activity has not stopped, and in recent months, Insikt Group has observed a resurgence of activity, reflecting the operators’ continued persistence. While much of the identified infrastructure is tied to known Predator operators in countries previously identified by Insikt Group, a new customer has also been identified in Mozambique — a country not previously publicly linked to the spyware. This aligns with the broader observation that Predator is highly active in Africa, with over half of its identified customers located on the continent. Additionally, Insikt Group has found a connection between high-tier Predator infrastructure and a Czech entity previously associated with the Intellexa Consortium.
On April 29, 2025, a select group of iOS users were notified by Apple that they were targeted with advanced spyware. Among the group were two journalists who consented to the technical analysis of their cases. In this report, we discuss key findings from our forensic analyses of their devices.
Researchers revealed on Thursday that two European journalists had their iPhones hacked with spyware made by Paragon. Apple says it has fixed the bug that was used to hack their phones.
The Citizen Lab wrote in its report, shared with TechCrunch ahead of its publication, that Apple had told its researchers that the flaw exploited in the attacks had been “mitigated in iOS 18.3.1,” a software update for iPhones released on February 10.
Until this week, the advisory of that security update mentioned only one unrelated flaw, which allowed attackers to disable an iPhone security mechanism that makes it harder to unlock phones.
On Thursday, however, Apple updated its February 10 advisory to include details about a new flaw, which was also fixed at the time but not publicized.
“A logic issue existed when processing a maliciously crafted photo or video shared via an iCloud Link. Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been exploited in an extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals,” reads the now-updated advisory.
In the final version of its report published Thursday, The Citizen Lab confirmed this is the flaw used against Italian journalist Ciro Pellegrino and an unnamed “prominent” European journalist
It’s unclear why Apple did not disclose the existence of this patched flaw until four months after the release of the iOS update, and an Apple spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment seeking clarity.
The Paragon spyware scandal began in January, when WhatsApp notified around 90 of its users, including journalists and human rights activists, that they had been targeted with spyware made by Paragon, dubbed Graphite.
Then, at the end of April, several iPhone users received a notification from Apple alerting them that they had been the targets of mercenary spyware. The alert did not mention the spyware company behind the hacking campaign.
On Thursday, The Citizen Lab published its findings confirming that two journalists who had received that Apple notification were hacked with Paragon’s spyware.
It’s unclear if all the Apple users who received the notification were also targeted with Graphite. The Apple alert said that “today’s notification is being sent to affected users in 100 countries.”
Throughout late 2024 and early 2025, iVerify detected anomalous activity on iPhones belonging to individuals affiliated with political campaigns, media organizations, A.I. companies and governments operating in the United States and European Union.
Specifically, we detected exceedingly rare crashes typically associated with sophisticated zero-click attacks via iMessage – an exploitation technique previously unobserved in any systematic way in the United States. Subsequent forensic examination of several of these devices ultimately revealed a previously unknown vulnerability in the “imagent” process which, owing to its relative position in the operating system and functionality, would provide attackers a primitive for further exploitation. This vulnerability was patched by Apple in iOS 18.3. We’ve dubbed this vulnerability NICKNAME.
In the course of our investigation, we discovered evidence suggesting – but not definitively proving – this vulnerability was exploited in targeted attacks as recently as March of this year. Specifically, we learned that Apple sent Threat Notifications to at least one device belonging to a senior government official in the EU on which we saw the highly anomalous crashes. Likewise, one device demonstrated behavior frequently associated with successful exploitation, specifically the creation and deletion of iMessage attachments in bulk within a matter of seconds on several occasions after an anomalous crash. We only observed these crashes on devices belonging to extremely high value targets. And these crashes constituted only .0001% of the crash log telemetry taken from a sample of 50,000 iPhones.
Spyware maker NSO Group will have to pay more than $167 million in damages to WhatsApp for a 2019 hacking campaign against more than 1,400 users.
On Tuesday, after a five-year legal battle, a jury ruled that NSO Group must pay $167,254,000 in punitive damages and around $444,719 in compensatory damages.
This is a huge legal win for WhatsApp, which had asked for more than $400,000 in compensatory damages, based on the time its employees had to dedicate to remediate the attacks, investigate them, and push fixes to patch the vulnerability abused by NSO Group, as well as unspecified punitive damages.
WhatsApp’s spokesperson Zade Alsawah said in a statement that “our court case has made history as the first victory against illegal spyware that threatens the safety and privacy of everyone.”
Alsawah said the ruling “is an important step forward for privacy and security as the first victory against the development and use of illegal spyware that threatens the safety and privacy of everyone. Today, the jury’s decision to force NSO, a notorious foreign spyware merchant, to pay damages is a critical deterrent to this malicious industry against their illegal acts aimed at American companies and the privacy and security of the people we serve.”
NSO Group’s spokesperson Gil Lainer left the door open for an appeal.
“We will carefully examine the verdict’s details and pursue appropriate legal remedies, including further proceedings and an appeal,” Lainer said in a statement.
In March 2025, our team found a suspicious mach-O file named wsus. Read the full analysis on its likely origins, target users, and observed functionality.
Two spyware variants – Moonshine and BadBazaar – are being used to target the mobile devices of persons of interest to Chinese intelligence, including individuals in the Taiwanese, Tibetan and Uyghur communities.
In our first investigation into Israel-based spyware company, Paragon Solutions, we begin to untangle multiple threads connected to the proliferation of Paragon's mercenary spyware operations across the globe. This report includes an infrastructure analysis of Paragon’s spyware product, called Graphite; a forensic analysis of infected devices belonging to members of civil society; and a closer look at the use of Paragon spyware in both Canada and Italy.
Cybersecurity firm Lookout found several samples of a North Korean spyware it calls KoSpy.
Lookout researchers have discovered a novel Android surveillance tool dubber KoSpy. It is attributed to APT 37 aka ScarCruft
Amnesty International’s Security Lab uncovers sophisticated Cellebrite zero-day exploit, impacting billions of Android devices.
Amnesty International said that Google fixed previously unknown flaws in Android that allowed authorities to unlock phones using forensic tools. On
Security researchers found evidence that Cellebrite was used by Serbian police to hack into the cellphones of a local journalist and an activist.
Italian company SIO, which sells to government customers, is behind an Android spyware campaign called Spyrtacus that spoofed popular apps like WhatsApp, per security researchers.
As an undercover journalist covering Italian politics, Francesco Cancellato is used to reporting on scandals. But he never thought he would be part of the story.
Following allegations of potential abuse, Paragon Solutions has cut off Italy from its spyware systems.
Barcelone se mue en “capitale européenne de la cyberguerre”. Depuis un an et demi, “au moins trois équipes renommées d’experts en piratage informatique”, venus d’Israël, se sont installées dans la capitale de la Catalogne, détaille El Periódico de Catalunya. Le journal espagnol s’appuie sur les informations du quotidien de Tel-Aviv Ha’Aretz, qui a publié le 26 décembre un article sur les hackers “délocalisés” d’Israël vers des pays de l’Union européenne, dont l’Espagne.
Cybersecurity experts, who work with human rights defenders and journalists, agree that Apple is doing the right thing by sending notifications to victims of mercenary spyware — and at the same time refusing to forensically analyze the devices.
The precedent-setting ruling from a Northern California federal judge could lead to massive damages against NSO Group, whose notorious spyware has been reportedly used by various governments worldwide.
