Darryl Burke wrote:
Sweet Chat, an Android based chatting and photo sharing application with over 10 million users, has been exposing its users chat content, and photos on an unsecured server. By using common MQTT related tools anyone can view real-time, the chats and private photos of all online Sweet Chat users.
Review of the exposed data, has made it evident that there is extensive “Bot” traffic being generated, and that it was used to lure users into spending credits (purchased under paid monthly subscriptions) or to send various gift cards for financial gain.
Read more about this on Respect My Securitay. Darryl’s post indicated that although he had notified them on July 21, by August 9 and the time of his post, the data were still unsecured.
DataBreaches.net was concerned about the risk of even posting a link to his write-up, but in an e-mail exchange, Darryl informed this site that he had sent them
a heads up with a copy of the blog post on Friday, letting them know I was making it live Monday morning. About 5 hours after it went live, I got an email from them with a “we are looking into it email and will get back to you” (No request to remove the post or give them more time strangely.) “
But there’s been more progress over the course of today, it seems. When Darryl just checked their server a while ago, he found that they had deployed a temporary fix, although in his opinion, they need major design changes to fix all the issues going forward. But right now, he believes, “the chance of someone using the disclosure to get to images is very low.”