Ring, owned by Amazon friend of annoying police departments everywhere, has suffered another embarrassing security stumble. Surveillance application Neighbors of the company—That it was launched in 2018 as a kind of “neighborhood surveillance” feature – apparently left users with accurate geographic data and home address information exposed in theInternet.
Neighbors is Ring’s online forum where users can share public safety information about what’s happening in their communities. Is it like that basically a more dystopian version of Nextdoor. Publications in Neighbors are public, but supposedly anonymous, with the full name and location of the author. However, due to the recently discovered security flaw, an experienced web browser could have accessed information about home addresses, as well as the exact latitude and longitude, of the publisher’s location. TechCrunch reports.
Similarly, each time a user posted to Neighbors, Ring servers generated a unique number for posting. These numbers increased incrementally with each post, making it easier to link the ID number with other information about the poster, including geographic data. TechCrunch. All this, however, was invisible to the user of the application.
The company claims to have solved the problem: “We solved this problem shortly after we became aware of it.” said a Ring spokesman in a statement. “We have not identified any evidence of malicious access or use of this information.” However, these are, of course, famous last words.
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Nor is it the first time Ring has suffered security issues. In fact, last year, Gizmodo revealed how the application data is displayed allowed journalists specify thousands of Ring users in the United States Even more unfortunate is the fact that Ring is currently sued last year, during a series of hacking incidents, in which cyber-dissenters stormed the home security system and threw racial insults, death threats and other obscenities at unsuspecting owners through devices connected to the Internet.
Ring, that was purchased by Amazon in 2018 for over $1 trillion, has done everything possible to compensate for these problems by strengthening security in other areas. Yesterday, for example, the company announced it would begin end-to-end encryption deployment for their products.
The company has it has often been criticized, not only for its security concerns, but for its broad relationship with law enforcement agencies across the country. In June last year, the company had partnerships with at least 1,300 police departments in the United States, making it basically a “for-profit surveillance network“.