Ring, owned by Amazon friend of curious police departments everywhere, has suffered another embarrassing security vulnerability. The supervision Neighbors app of the company– launched in 2018 as a sort of ‘neighborhood watch’ feature – apparently left users exact geographic and home address information on the iinternet.
Neighbors is Ring’s online forum where users can share public safety information about what’s going on in their community. Her actually a more dystopian version of Nextdoor. Posts on Neighbors are public, but supposedly anonymous, with the full name and location of a poster hidden. But because of the recently discovered security bug, a smart web explorer would have been able to access information about the home addresses, as well as the exact latitude and longitude of a poster’s location, TechCrunch Reports.
Similarly, Ring servers generated a unique number for the post every time a user posted to Neighbors. These numbers increased incrementally with each post, making it easy to match the identification number with other information about the poster, including geographic data, according to TechCrunch. However, all of this was invisible to the app user.
The company claims to have remedied the issue: “We resolved this issue shortly after becoming aware of it”, a Ring spokesman said in a statement. “We have found no evidence that this information is being accessed or used in a malicious manner.” Yet these are, of course, famous last words.
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This is certainly not the first time that Ring has had security vulnerabilities. In fact, last year, Gizmodo unveiled how data is displayed by the app allowed reporters point out thousands of Ring users in the US Even more unfortunate is the fact that Ring is is currently being prosecuted across a slew of hacking incidents last year in which cyber-disgruntled people made their way into the home security system, hurling racist insults, death threats and other obscenities at unsuspecting homeowners through the internet-connected devices.
Ring, that was acquired by Amazon in 2018 for over $1 billion, has done its best to solve these problems by improving security in other areas. Yesterday, for example the company announced it would start rolling out end-to-end encryption for its products.
The company has often criticized by criticism, not only for its security concerns, but also for its extensive relationship with law enforcement agencies across the country. Since June last year at least the company had partnerships with 1,300 police departments in the US, making it essentially a “for-profit surveillance network. ”