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March 14, 2020 04:34 pm

900 Million Secrets From 8 Years of 'Whisper' App Were Left Exposed Online

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a startling report from the Washington Post:Whisper, the secret-sharing app that called itself the "safest place on the Internet," left years of users' most intimate confessions exposed on the Web tied to their age, location and other details, raising alarm among cybersecurity researchers that users could have been unmasked or blackmailed. The data exposure, discovered by independent researchers and shown to The Washington Post, allowed anyone to access all of the location data and other information tied to anonymous "whispers" posted to the popular social app, which has claimed hundreds of millions of users. The records were viewable on a non-password-protected database open to the public Web. A Post reporter was able to freely browse and search through the records, many of which involved children: A search of users who had listed their age as 15 returned 1.3 million results. The cybersecurity consultants Matthew Porter and Dan Ehrlich, who lead the advisory group Twelve Security, said they were able to access nearly 900 million user records from the app's release in 2012 to the present day. The researchers alerted federal law-enforcement officials and the company to the exposure. Shortly after researchers and The Post contacted the company on Monday, access to the data was removed.

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