Ring, Amazon property friend of nosy police departments everywhere, suffered another embarrassing stumble in security. Surveillance company neighbors app—That was launched in 2018 as a kind of “neighborhood watch” feature – apparently left users with exact geographic data and home address information exposed to the internetInternet.
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. Posts in Neighbors are public, but supposedly anonymous, with the full name and location of the poster hidden. However, due to the recently discovered security bug, a more experienced web explorer would be able to access information about home addresses, as well as the exact latitude and longitude of a poster’s location, TechCrunch Reports.
Likewise, every time a user posted on Neighbors, the Ring servers generated a unique number for the post. These numbers gradually increased with each post, making it easier to link the identification number to other information about the poster, including geographic data, according to TechCrunch. All of this was invisible to the application user, however.
The company claims to have fixed the problem: “We fixed this problem right after we became aware of it”, a Ring spokesman said in a statement. “We have not identified any evidence that this information is being accessed or used maliciously.” However, these are, of course, famous last words.
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This is definitely not the first time that Ring has had security problems. In fact, last year, Gizmodo unveiled how data is exposed by the application allowed reporters to locate thousands of Ring users in the United States. Even more unfortunate is the fact that the Ring is currently being processed over a series of hacker incidents last year, in which cyber-crooks invaded the home security system and launched racial slurs, death threats and other obscenities at unsuspecting owners through devices connected to the Internet.
Ring, which was acquired by Amazon in 2018 for more than $1 billion, did its best to compensate for these problems by strengthening security in other areas. Yesterday, for example, the company announced that it would start implementing end-to-end encryption for your products.
The company has he was frequently criticized, not only for his security problems, but for his extensive relationship with law enforcement agencies across the country. In June last year, the company had partnerships with at least 1,300 police departments across the US, essentially making it a “for-profit surveillance network. ”