What We’re Doing to Fight the Scourge of Cyber Stalking


Damon McCoy, a professor of computer science and engineering at NYU Tandon, is involved in this project.

It’s a sad fact of life that technology can be used to stalk, harass and harm people’s partners, acquaintances and even strangers. … Because of the seriousness of the problem, at Symantec we set out to how to detect creepware and protect victims and would-be victims from it. In concert with researchers at Cornell and New York University [Tandon School of Engineering], we created CreepRank, which ranks the probability that any given app is used as creepware. We have incorporated CreepRank into Norton Mobile Security, which stops the covert surveillance apps it detects from being installed on people’s phones and warns of their presence if they are already there.

See more...