Identity Theft with Dating Apps
Want to make your online dating easier? You may want to try one of the new and efficient dating apps. Want to have a hacker steal your personal information? You may want to try one of the new dating apps! PC Magazine online says that with some dating apps not only will some hacker in Russia have your social security number and passwords but vital information of the company your work for as well.
“Easygoing, athletic man seeking hacker to loot personal details and corporate data.”
According to IBM Security, more than 60 percent of mobile dating apps are vulnerable to cyber attacks since they have access to features like the camera, microphone, storage, GPS location, and billing information. Meanwhile, 50 percent of the businesses examined by IBM had employees who had installed dating apps on phones with access to private work data.
“Many consumers use and trust their mobile phones for a variety of applications. It is this trust that gives hackers the opportunity to exploit vulnerabilities like the ones we found in these dating apps,” Caleb Barlow, vice president of IBM Security, said in a statement.
Specifically, 26 of the 41 Android dating apps analyzed by IBM in its new study have medium- or high-severity vulnerabilities. The names of those apps were not disclosed, but IBM said it has notified all impacted app vendors. Windows Phone and iOS apps were not examined.
According to the IBM study many android dating apps are hackers dreams come true. Identity theft with dating apps changes the picture from an easy way to meet someone to an easy way to have a thief enter your personal life.
Keeping Your Nude Selfies to Yourself
A new aspect of dating is the ability to take a picture of yourself, often without clothing, and send it to your significant other via your cellphone. According to FC technology the reason you should not overshare on dating apps is that the programing is often of low quality which makes it easy for hackers to get into your life and steal pictures of your naked body!
“There are poor coding practices in the apps that make it very easy for an attacker to steal your private and sensitive information,” Barlow says. (He means your nude selfies.)
A Stalker’s Dream
A dating app that functions as designed is a problem a well. Happn dating app allows users to connect to users who pass within a 250 radius.
Happn is the latest addition to the app-based dating scene. Happn helps you track down strangers whom you’ve walked past or queued for a coffee behind at Pret. Rather than liking random people to match with in your general location (like Tinder), Happn uses GPS to connect users who cross paths within a 250 metre radius. So, whoever you encounter (knowingly or not) and like the look of, you can see if they’re on Happn and tap the app’s “heart” symbol to show your interest. If they heart you back then the dating begins.
This one is not about identity theft with dating apps but rather leaving yourself open to some nut case who decides to stalk you!