Despite governments' best efforts, spyware is still running rampant on the threat landscape. These types of tracking malware are used to target high-profile individuals like politicians, activists, journalists and more — and even sometimes for jealous exes to track their former partners. Asheer Malhotra, who recently dissected the Predator spyware, joins Talos Takes this week to talk about Predator and its associated tool, Alien. Asheer shares new technical details about this spyware and discusses why "mercenary" spyware groups are on the rise.

If listeners suspect their system(s) may have been compromised by commercial spyware, please consider notifying Talos’ research team at talos-mercenary-spyware-help@external.cisco.com to assist in furthering the community’s knowledge of these threats.