The Adversary in Your Bed: Stalkerware, Domestic Violence, and the Hacker Defense
Sara Kurtzberg,
Sarah E. Ross-Benjamin,
Efrat Sternberg
Domestic violence breaks every assumption in your threat model. The adversary has physical access, knows the passcode, owns the cloud account, pays the bill, and shares the bed. No consumer device is designed for that adversary. This panel looks at what happens when intimate-partner abuse goes digital: covert stalkerware (mSpy, FlexiSPY, pcTattletale, Cocospy), the weaponization of legitimate consumer tech (Find My, Life360, Ring, shared iCloud, AirTags, vehicle telematics), and the surveillance-by-default architecture of modern households. Every major consumer spyware vendor on that list has been breached and dumped. The customer bases were overwhelmingly abusers. Hackers, not regulators, made that visible. This panel will cover detection in the field: MVT, TinyCheck, the Coalition Against Stalkerware’s indicator list, and triage on a phone the survivor cannot safely hand over for imaging. They will cover what prosecutors actually do with that evidence at charging and trial. And they will name the institutions carrying this load: the EFF, Citizen Lab, Operation Safe Escape, NNEDV’s Safety Net Project. Most of them are not government.
The point of putting this panel on a HOPE stage is direct. Prosecutors and DV advocates need hackers. Hackers often see this work as inaccessible or institutionally hostile. This panel maintains that it isn’t. This is an invitation.
Sunday 1100 Grand Ballroom
Sara Kurtzberg is a native of Staten Island and a SUNY Binghamton and Albany Law School graduate. She joined the Kings’ County District Attorney’ s Office in July 2007. She was promoted to senior ADA in 2012 before joining the Homicide Bureau in 2015. She has tried more than 35 felony jury trials as lead, including at least seven homicides, and has been particularly adept in using technology to advance case investigation and prosecution. She was promoted to deputy bureau chief in the Trial Bureau Green in 2019. She has been a pioneer in using video evidence and technology at trial. In 2021, she was selected as one of just 21 prosecutors nationwide to attend training on the latest digital evidence technologies for prosecutors at the National Computer Forensic Institute (NCFI).
Sarah E. Ross-Benjamin is a major case assistant district attorney in the Human Trafficking Unit of the Bronx District Attorney’s Office, where she investigates and prosecutes human trafficking and child sexual abuse material (CSAM) cases from inception of investigation through trial. Her work sits at the intersection of technology and exploitation: trafficking operations that recruit, advertise, and control victims through social media and online platforms, and cases where digital forensic evidence is central to both identifying offenders and protecting victims. In addition to building cases alongside NYPD detectives - drafting search warrants and subpoenas, analyzing platform data and digital evidence - she conducts forensic interviews of victims of domestic and sexual violence, including child witnesses.
Efrat Sternberg is an attorney, Title IX and equal opportunity investigator, educator, and member of the Board of Directors of the New Yo rk State Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NYSCADV). She has spent more than two decades supporting individuals impacted by intimate-partner violence, sexual harm, and abuse, beginning as a volunteer at a domestic violence shelter at age 15. Before entering higher education, she served as a felony prosecutor in the Bronx and Kings County District Attorney’ s Offices, prosecuting cases involving domestic violence, sexual violence, child abuse, and human trafficking. Today, she conducts trauma-informed investigations and provides educat ion on survivor-centered practices, institutional responses, and accountability. Efrat also focuses on the growing intersection of technology and interpersonal violence. She holds a master’ s degree in global affairs from New York University, with a concentration in global security, conflict, and cybercrime, an d integrates this expertise into her work educating professionals on technology-facilitated abuse and digital safety.
