Unlikely hit app Yo is 'hacked' by students | Hacker News Reader

Unlikely hit app Yo is 'hacked' by students

bbc.co.uk

14 pointsColinWright11 comments

I'm puzzled when new, "innovative" (well, in some sense) apps such as this get hit by simple hacks such as this one. I was puzzled as well when some idiotic misuse of encryption exposed WhatsApp data (I'm not sure if I remember correctly, but that was the gist of it). Startups bear a distinct culture around them, and for me at least it means very capable hackers behind them. But I would seldom consider anyone who'd commit such fundamental security no-nos a "capable hacker".

But, after all, this Yo thingy doesn't even look like a real startup.

I think its the size of the burden. If you're creating a thing from scratch and are responsible for pretty much every single aspect of it from dev to sysadmin PLUS you have CTO responsibilities on top of that you just lose track of stuff and make the odd mistake.

"I'll fix that a bit later" becomes "I have no idea what code is there anymore nor even the time to contemplate it".

Perhaps.

It's a data leak...very similar to snapchat's issue and the Apple iPad fiasco found by weev. It's pretty sad that an App with almost no functionality had any problem.

It's also interesting how these developers seem to repeat this exact mistake over and over. I don't understand how people don't see a public facing API call for mapping usernames to phonenumbers or phonenumbers to usernames as a bad idea...

Because security is not easy. Often when I ask these questions the responses range from not being worth bothering with because we still shop at Target, even though they've been hit, to just dealing with a breach after the fact, rather than being a little more proactive about it.

E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7920558

Like I said, security is hard. Microsoft is the only large corporate I know of with a published security development lifecycle, and while it's starting to benefit their products they're still not getting it 100% either. Security is also contentious, because doing it right means forsaking the idea of an MVP. It also requires design up front. And experience. These sorts of things are not exactly aligned with the hacker mindset, nor with startup culture.

Of course real, rock-hard security is hard to get right.

But it seems to me that the issue here is that some common sense security measure wasn't employed. The author didn't even think about what APIs he/she exposed. That's very different (and more irresponsible) than not designing a competitive and solid security system up front.

Absolutely security is hard...and it's also not what `Yo' is really worried about. If they have to worry about security, then they already hit it big and they can just fix the issue ex post leako.

On the one hand, 'Yo' was created in a day. Though maybe the author should've spent say a week on it.

On the other, it's been proven possible to ignore or botch security until you have to make a minor show of apologizing for it, without fear of consequence, if you've already gotten enough traction. Unfortunately, this only seems to prove to businesses that security is a fruitless endeavor, and a waste of effort better spent making sure the UI is shinier. On the third, i've had to explain to people and their startups that SQL injection and XSS even exists, much less that it's a problem worth dealing with now so there might also be an education issue.

I think the answer would probably be more things which are secure out of the box. In particular, frameworks and the languages themselves (I'm looking at you PHP) which interface with the web should default to secure as much as possible.

The Game of Thrones producers should release a competing app called 'Hodor'.

'Yo' reminds me to Woof, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wfG8ngFvPk

Because the app has very little purpose, its obvious why it exists at all: It enables the collection of networked data. But because it was built in 8 hours, you get what you put into it.

"built in 8 hours", "does basically nothing" but here, ping people through it and allow us to map this activity to your phone number and user name.

So when this data leaks, everyone gets puzzled. Are we conflating the importance of the data with the importance of the app?

Discussion from when this happened a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7920023

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