Privacy disaster as LGBTQ+ and BDSM dating apps leak private photos.
Privacy disaster as LGBTQ+ and BDSM dating apps leak private photos.
BDSM, LGBTQ+, and sugar dating apps have been found exposing users' private images, with some of them even leaking photos shared in private messages.
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Cybernews researchers have found that BDSM People, CHICA, TRANSLOVE, PINK, and BRISH apps had publicly accessible secrets published together with the apps’ code.
All of the affected apps are developed by M.A.D Mobile Apps Developers Limited. Their identical architecture explains why the same type of sensitive data was exposed.
What secrets were leaked?
- API Key
- Client ID
- Google App ID
- Project ID
- Reversed Client ID
- Storage Bucket
- GAD Application Identifier
- Database URL
[...] threat actors can easily abuse them to gain access to systems. In this case, the most dangerous of leaked secrets granted access to user photos located in Google Cloud Storage buckets, which had no passwords set up.
In total, nearly 1.5 million user-uploaded images, including profile photos, public posts, profile verification images, photos removed for rule violations, and private photos sent through direct messages, were left publicly accessible to anyone.
So the devs were inexperienced in secure architectures and put a bunch of stuff on the client which should probably have been on the server side. This leaves anyone open to just use their API to access every picture they have on their servers. They then made multiple dating apps with this faulty infrastructure by copy-pasting it everywhere.
I hope they are registered in a country with strong data privacy laws, so they have to feel the consequences of their mismanagement
Inexperienced? This is not-giving-a-fuck level.
No, it's lack of experience. When I was a junior dev, I had a hard enough time understanding how things worked, much less understanding how they could be compromised by an attacker.
Junior devs need senior devs to learn that kind of stuff.
It does help if services that generate or store secrets and keys display a large warning that they should be kept secret, every time they're viewed, no matter the experience level of the viewer. But yeah understanding why and how isn't something that should be assumed for new devs.
I've met the type who run businesses like that, and they likely do deserve punishment for it. My own experience involved someone running gray legality betting apps, and the owner was a cheapskate who got unpaid interns and filipino outsourced work to build their app. Guy didn't even pay 'em sometimes.
Granted, you could also hire inexperienced people if you're a good person with no financial investor, but that I've mostly seen with education apps and other low profit endeavors. Sex stuff definitely is someone trying to score cash.
The illusion of choice
A lot of "normal" dating apps are also owned by the same companies
Every single one of those “secrets” is publicly available information for every single Firebase project. The real issue is the developers didn’t have proper access control checks.