Use of stalkerware, GPS tracking and other technologies to commit family violence abuse has increased sharply in the past five years but a new tool to detect covert apps on victims’ phones is about to be rolled out.
Research with frontline family violence workers by peak domestic violence network Wesnet found tracking and monitoring of women by perpetrators had risen 244 per cent between 2015 and 2020 and the most common abuse experienced with physical family violence is stalking, often via technological means.
More than one-third (38.7 per cent) of 442 frontline workers surveyed said clients were having their banking and finances tracked, monitored and restricted by perpetrators via technology “all the time” and another third saw it happening “often”.
Almost all frontline workers, 99.3 per cent, have clients reporting online abuse.
“As the [monitoring and GPS] technology has become more popular or more widespread or cheaper, we’ve seen an increase of abusers misusing those technologies for abuse,” said Wesnet chief executive Karen Bentley, whose group represents 350 family violence service members.
“We see new and emerging ways that tech is being used that we didn’t back in 2015, such as children being given phones or other devices as a way for abusers to contact or monitor the mother of the child and children’s social media accounts being used.”
Terms of reference for the Law Reform Commission’s review of Victoria’s stalking laws were released on Thursday following a request by the family of murdered woman Celeste Manno, who was stalked in the year prior to her death in November.
Cyber security company Kaspersky and Wesnet will launch free technology developed by the company as part of the global Coalition Against Stalkerware on March 1 at the Melbourne business festival Pause Fest.
Wesnet is the first Australian family violence organisation to join the international coalition, and will help distribute the open-source program, TinyCheck, to enable family violence services to identify if victim-survivors are being monitored.
Noushin Shabab, a cyber security researcher with Kaspersky who is working with 26 family violence groups around the world, said some abusers manipulated legal apps such as “parental control” programs to use them to stalk victims, who are almost always women.
She said TinyCheck could identify if phones were affected by stalkerware without the perpetrator being alerted.
“Applications are getting more sophisticated and giving perpetrators more and more access,” said Ms Shabab, whose day job usually involves investigating global security threats.
“TinyCheck creates Wi-Fi networks the victim can join and then outgoing traffic from their phone is recorded and ‘sniffed’ to see if there is something [stalkerware] matched on their phone. It has been designed not to interfere with the phone at all.”
The captured network traffic can be copied and taken to police as evidence a phone has been infected by stalkerware without the perpetrator knowing.
Ms Bentley said it was vital to take strong action against stalking because of its extremely high association with subsequent serious physical harm to the victim. “Stalking is associated with a significant risk of lethal or near-lethal harm,” she said.
“A 2020 meta-analysis showed that stalking was associated with a 2.79 times [higher] risk of intimate partner homicide.”
Ms Bentley said stalking was also known to have very harmful effects on victim-survivors’ mental health.
“It is a really big issue and most police and certainly no frontline services have access to any kind of forensic software that could do a scan to see if there are any of these apps on devices,” she said.
Source: https://www.theage.com.au/national/family-violence-tech-stalkers-are-about-to-be-caught-out-20210220-p5749d.html