Two main safety vulnerabilities within the Tea app – which claims to make relationship safer for girls – have uncovered the personal chats and private knowledge of a minimum of tens of 1000’s of customers.
The app, designed to permit ladies to share “crimson flags” for males they’d dated, claimed 4 million lively customers after it hit the highest slot within the App Retailer final week …
The Tea app permits feminine customers to tag males’s relationship profiles with considered one of quite a lot of “crimson flags,” in addition to permitting reverse picture searches to establish the boys behind the profiles. Crimson flags vary from ghosting contacts by way of being in an present relationship to sexual assault.
The app was already proving controversial on privateness grounds, with some males saying it was unreasonable to hyperlink their profiles to their social media and extra, however that was simply the beginning.
The primary Tea app safety breach
404 Media final week reported that 4chan customers found an uncovered database containing private knowledge, together with selfies and pictures of driver’s licenses used to confirm their id to the app.
Customers say they’re rifling by way of peoples’ private knowledge and selfies uploaded to the app, after which posting that knowledge on-line, in keeping with screenshots, 4chan posts, and code reviewed by 404 Media. In an announcement to 404 Media, Tea confirmed the breach additionally impacted some direct messages however stated that the info is from two years in the past.
That is regardless of the developer claiming that id paperwork are deleted after verification.
Nevertheless it acquired worse
Nevertheless, the declare that the info was two years’ previous didn’t final lengthy. In a follow-up report, 404 Media stated that hackers had been capable of entry personal messages between customers – with knowledge as current as one week in the past.
A second, main safety problem with ladies’s relationship security app Tea has uncovered far more consumer knowledge than the primary breach we first reported final week, with an impartial safety researcher now discovering it was potential for hackers to entry messages between customers discussing abortions, dishonest companions, and telephone numbers they despatched to at least one one other.
Regardless of Tea’s preliminary assertion that “the incident concerned a legacy knowledge storage system containing data from over two years in the past,” the second problem impacting a separate database is far more current, affecting messages up till final week, in keeping with the researcher’s findings that 404 Media verified. The researcher stated additionally they discovered the power to ship a push notification to all of Tea’s customers.
Whereas the chats had been related to usernames moderately than precise names, the positioning discovered that the content material of the chats meant it was usually trivial to establish the account holders. Feminine customers had steadily shared social media hyperlinks with one another, for instance.
Equally, it was simply as straightforward to establish the male account holders accused of wrong-doing.
The stories say that greater than 70,000 photos have been uncovered, however this may occasionally simply be the tip of the iceberg given the corporate stated it had 1.6M customers earlier than the primary breach was found.
9to5Mac’s Take
Selfies and photograph ID used to confirm identities ought to by no means be retained as soon as the method is full, and personal chats between customers ought to be protected by end-to-end encryption. That neither of those primary safety measures had been adopted could be of concern in any app, not to mention one which claims to guard ladies, and which actively encourages the sharing of essentially the most delicate private knowledge.
It’s additionally considerably ironic this occurred the week UK legislation calls for that tech firms present the UK authorities with backdoor entry into personal messages.
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