BDSM, LGBTQ+, and sugar dating apps have been found exposing users’ private images, with some of them even leaking photos shared in private messages.
Brace yourselves, because this is only going to get worse with the current “vibe coding” trend.
So we are moving away from >1GB node_modules finally? Or is it too soon?
Its going to be 1GB node_modules handled by garbage ai code
ai is only good at doing smaller scripts but loosing connections and understandment in larger codebases, combined with people who cant program well (i mean not only coding but debugging… as well) also called vibe programmers its going to be a messif a product claims it has vibecoding: find an alternative!
Can you ELI5?
Vibe coding is the current trend of having an LLM build your codebase for you then shipping it without attempting to understand the codebase.
Most developers are using LLMS to some extent to speed up their coding, as cursor and Claude are really good at removing toil. But vibe coders have the LLM build the entire thing and don’t even know how it works.
In other words, vibe coders are today’s technologically accelerated script kiddie.
That’s arguably worse as the produced scripts may largely work and come with even less demand for understanding than a script kid’s cobbling together of code may have demanded.
100% accurate.
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.
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.
The illusion of choice
A lot of “normal” dating apps are also owned by the same companies
Anyone who uses Grindr, please be aware that any photos you send are cached and stored unencrypted in plain old folders on the receiver’s phone, regardless of whether they were expiring or in an album that you later revoked. It’s nearly trivial to grab any photo someone sends you, with no watermark or screenshot notification.
Just don’t send nudes… why do people think other people won’t figure out how to screenshot or just keep photos forever? Even if you trust the person, the person could get hacked… the pwned guy got pwned for Jehova’s sake. Just stop sending that
shit.
