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Confessions App "Whisper" Spills Almost a Billion Records

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday March 18 2020, @03:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the I-didn't-know-you-were-into-that! dept.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow420:

Confessions app Whisper spills almost a billion records:

Researchers who uncovered a data exposure from mobile app Whisper earlier this week have released more details about the incident.

Whisper is an app from MediaLab, a mobile app company that owns a host of other apps including the popular messaging service Kik. It offers a kind of anonymous social network service that allows people to post their innermost fears and desires, supposedly without risk.

Its users post everything from dark family secrets to stories of infidelity. It gathers these up and uses them for articles on its website, including "Naughty Nannies Confess To Sleeping With The Fathers They Work For", "Alcoholism Runs In My Family", and "I Married The Wrong Person".

The problem, according to researcher Dan Ehrlich of cybersecurity consultancy Twelve Security, is that Whisper didn't steward that data very well. He says that he and his colleague Matthew Porter accessed 900m records in a 5 TB database spanning 75 different servers, logged between the app's release in 2012 and the present day. The data was stored in plain text on ElasticSearch servers and included 90 metadata points per account.

The Washington Post broke the story about the app on Monday 10 March, having worked with the researchers.

The Washington Post

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday March 18 2020, @05:18PM (2 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 18 2020, @05:18PM (#972826) Journal

    People telling their darkest secrets to some unknown cloudy social media app?

    Facebook. Twitter. Google. They are known to respect privacy.

    Self-conscious people going out into the street with their dick out?

    It would be too cold to do this in the Canadian city you misspelled in the subject line.

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    The people who rely on government handouts and refuse to work should be kicked out of congress.
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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by captain normal on Wednesday March 18 2020, @05:33PM (1 child)

    by captain normal (2205) on Wednesday March 18 2020, @05:33PM (#972839)

    Tonto is a Spanish word for crazy or idiot. It is considered quite an insult to Native Americans, especially after they named the Lone Ranger's sidekick Tonto.

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    When life isn't going right, go left.

    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday March 18 2020, @06:25PM

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 18 2020, @06:25PM (#972863) Journal

      I knew of the Lone Ranger usage. I did not know that was also a word with an established meaning. Thanks.

      --
      The people who rely on government handouts and refuse to work should be kicked out of congress.