According to Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto and computer security firm Kaspersky Lab, police forces around the world have purchased mobile malware for all phone types.

Produced by a company called Hacking Team, the malware has been dubbed Remote Control System (RCS). They found 320 command-and-control (C&C) servers for RCS running in over 40 countries, presumably by law enforcement agencies.


Once on a target's mobile, the RCS software can intercept and record all phone calls, SMS messages, chat conversations from apps such as Viber, WhatsApp and Skype, grab any files or pictures on the handset, spy on the calendar, look up the user's location, and take screenshots whenever the operator specifies, as well as harvesting data from third-party applications like Facebook.

Hacking Team states that the software should only be used to track down criminals, but Citizen Watch refutes that claim and says the software is aimed at political targets in Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Morocco and Ethiopia.

Citizen Watch said: "This type of exceptionally invasive toolkit, once a costly boutique capability deployed by intelligence communities and militaries, is now available to all but a handful of governments. An unstated assumption is that customers that can pay for these tools will use them correctly, and primarily for strictly overseen, legal purposes. As our research has shown, however, by dramatically lowering the entry cost on invasive and hard-to-trace monitoring, the equipment lowers the cost of targeting political threats."