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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 18 2020, @06:35PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 18 2020, @06:35PM (#972867)

    I've got a plunger to sell you when you're ready.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Wednesday March 18 2020, @07:27PM (1 child)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 18 2020, @07:27PM (#972883) Journal

    I think he'll want more than one plunger. Need to stock up, for covid-19, you know.

    --
    To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.

    • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday March 18 2020, @08:22PM

      by Gaaark (41) on Wednesday March 18 2020, @08:22PM (#972904) Journal

      Shit! That reminds me I gotta buy a tea cozy before the stores run out! Because of cofveve-69, you know!
      :)

      --
      --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---

  • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 18 2020, @07:54PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 18 2020, @07:54PM (#972890)

    My outhouse toilet doesn't have pipes.