Tea, a girls’s security relationship app that surged to the highest of the free iOS App Retailer listings, suffered a significant safety breach final week. The corporate confirmed Friday that it “recognized approved entry to one in all our programs” that uncovered hundreds of person photographs. And now we all know that DMs had been accessed through the breach, too.
Tea’s preliminary findings from the top of final week confirmed the info breach uncovered roughly 72,000 photographs: 13,000 photographs of selfies and picture identification that individuals had submitted throughout account verification, and 59,000 photographs that had been publicly viewable within the app from posts, feedback and direct messages.
These photographs had been saved in a “legacy information system” that contained data from greater than two years in the past, the corporate mentioned in assertion. “Presently, there isn’t a proof to counsel that present or further person information was affected.”
Earlier Friday, posts on Reddit and 404 Media reported that Tea app customers’ faces and IDs had been posted on nameless on-line message board 4chan. Tea requires customers to confirm their identities with selfies or IDs, which is why driver’s licenses and photos of individuals’s faces are within the leaked information.
And on Monday, a Tea spokesperson confirmed to CNET that it moreover “lately realized that some direct messages (DMs) had been accessed as a part of the preliminary incident.” Tea has additionally taken that affected system offline. That affirmation adopted a report by 404 Media on Monday that an impartial safety researcher found it could have been doable for hackers to realize entry to DMs between Tea customers, affecting messages despatched as much as final week on the Tea app.
Tea mentioned it has launched a full investigation to evaluate the scope and affect of the breach.
What’s Tea?
The premise of Tea is to offer girls with an area to report unfavorable interactions they’ve had whereas encountering males within the relationship pool, with the intention of preserving different girls secure.
The app is presently sitting on the No. 2 spot free of charge apps on Apple’s US App Retailer, proper after ChatGPT, drawing worldwide consideration and sparking a debate about whether or not the app violates males’s privateness. Following the information of the info breach, it additionally performs into the broader ongoing debate round whether or not on-line id and age verification pose an inherent safety threat to web customers.
Within the privateness part on its web site, Tea says: “Tea Courting Recommendation takes affordable safety measures to guard your Private Info to stop loss, misuse, unauthorized entry, disclosure, alteration and destruction. Please bear in mind, nevertheless, that regardless of our efforts, no safety measures are impenetrable.”
