Previous customers of viral ladies’s courting security app Tea are the most recent victims of a large cyberattack, which has rendered 1000’s of person photos held in a legacy database susceptible.
First reported by Reddit customers, the hack was verified by 404Media and later confirmed by Tea itself, and impacts 72,000 photos posted to the app over the past two years. Of the hacked information, 13,000 photos had been selfies or photograph identification playing cards like drivers licenses submitted by customers to confirm their accounts. One other 59,000 photos saved within the database had been of people posted to the app.
Tea, based by Sean Cook dinner, was designed as a women-only app for customers to doc their destructive experiences with males and warn different ladies of potential hazard. Based on Tea’s web site, 10 p.c of its income are donated the Nationwide Home Violence Hotline.
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The vulnerability was found by customers on 4Chan, who started sharing photograph IDs of ladies on the platform. In a thread detailing the hack, one person wrote: “Sure, in case you despatched Tea App your face and drivers license, they doxxed you publicly! No authentication, no nothing. It is a public bucket. DRIVERS LICENSES AND FACE PICS! GET THE FUCK IN HERE BEFORE THEY SHUT IT DOWN!” Different customers acknowledged they had been accumulating private data from the photographs, 404Media reported. In a press release to the publication, Tea mentioned the info was saved to adjust to cyber-bullying prevention necessities and that no present person data had been breached.
Earlier this week and as a result of a number of viral tweets from its customers, Tea turned the primary app on the Apple App Retailer. The trending app has since develop into the topic of on-line controversy, significantly from people who disagree with the app’s concentrate on documenting undesirable and inappropriate habits of males in a public discussion board, with out verification. Many critics (together with males who’ve been implicated on the app) see the app’s reporting mechanisms, reminiscent of customers posting photos of “crimson flag” males, and its person verification system, which makes use of pictures to “affirm” a person’s gender, as violations of privateness.
Culturally, others fear it is forum-like nature is just too just like on-line snark pages, which frequently incentive customers to have interaction in obsessive cycles of gossip and on-line harassment, and will probably result in doxxing. It has been in comparison with the favored “Are we courting the identical man?” Fb web page.
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In an X publish from July 22, one person wrote, “How lengthy til there’s a information leak? I am giving it 1 month.” Different emboldened on-line customers responded to the recognition of the women-only app with overtly misogynistic “copycat” apps, together with ones meant to trace ladies’s “physique counts.” “Introducing BoxScore, a man-only app the place customers anonymously share information and warnings about ladies to identify crimson flags and get suggestions,” wrote person @tolly_xyz in a publish on X.
