Viber Has Your Messaging And Voice Data Up For Grabs | TechTree.com

Viber Has Your Messaging And Voice Data Up For Grabs

Claims that no users have complained about being affected by the data issue.

 

If you love the messaging app on your shiny new smartphone and text away every few seconds there is a lot of information out there about you that is waiting to be exploited. Yes, not all messaging apps are as secure as they claim to be. Recent news reported by ‘nakedsecurity’ (a blog) points to some really interesting insights that will make you want to switch from WhatsApp and Viber to something more secure.

The report points out the fact that Viber’s user data is openly available for anyone to see. Research conducted by the University of New Haven proves that Viber’s user data stored on its servers is left completely insecure and available for anyone who knows the URL.  Forget encryption, there are no passwords for the user data that is left unencrypted on their servers.

Strangely Viber was not the only candidate to qualify for not protecting its user’s data. WhatsApp the world’s most popular messaging app seemed to have similar vulnerabilities. Researchers say that data from the popular messaging service can be accessed using simple traffic sniffing tools making millions of users the victims. Lucky for them, no one has tampered with it just yet.

Viber claims that it did fix the issue saying:
“This issue has already been resolved. It is currently in QA and the fix will be released for Android and submitted to Apple on Monday. As of today we aren’t aware of a single user who has been affected by this. “

A rather strange comment considering there is a lot of user data at stake here coming from millions of active users worldwide. A couple of years back Sony’s PlayStation network fell prey to a similar attack from hackers who posted the user data online for the world to see. Sony had not encrypted their user data (which included credit card information) till the attack took place and has now taken care of the issue.


TAGS: Apps, Software

 
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