Ring, owned by Amazon friend with curious police departments everywhere, suffered another embarrassing security breach. oversight Company Neighbors application– which was launched in 2018 as a kind of “neighborhood surveillance” feature – apparently left users with accurate geographic data and home address information exposed to internet.
Neighbors is Ring’s online forum, where users can share public safety information about what’s going on in their communities. It is basically a more dystopian version of Nextdoor. Neighbor posts are public, but are supposed to be anonymous, with the full name and location of a poster hidden. However, due to the recently discovered security flaw, a web browser expert could have accessed information about home addresses as well as the exact latitude and longitude of a poster’s location, TechCrunch reports.
Similarly, each time a user posted on Neighbors, Ring servers generated a unique number to post. These numbers increased incrementally with each post, making it easier to link the identification number to other poster information, including geographic data, according to TechCrunch. However, all of these were invisible to the application user.
The company claims that it fixed the problem: “I fixed this problem shortly after I found out”, said a Ring spokesman in a statement. “We have not identified any evidence that this information was accessed or misused.” However, these are, of course, famous last words.
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This is certainly not the first time Ring has suffered from security issues. In fact, last year, Gizmodo revealed how the data exposed by the application allowed reporters to identify thousands of Ring users in the US Even more unfortunate is that the Ring is currently on trial over a series of hacking incidents last year in which cyber content entered the home security system and threw racial insults, death threats and other obscenities at unsuspecting homeowners via internet-connected devices.
Ring, that was purchased by Amazon in 2018 for over $1 billion, has done everything possible to compensate for these problems by strengthening security in other areas. Yesterday, for example, the company has announced that it will start launch end-to-end encryption for its products.
The company has he was frequently persecuted by critics, not only for his security problems, but also for his extended relationship with law enforcement agencies across the country. Since June last year, the company had partnerships with at least 1,300 police departments across the United States, making it essentially a “for-profit surveillance network. ”