How’s your Friday night going? If you’re planning to hook-up or get flirty tonight via those Grindr (LGBT) or Blendr (straight) location-based hook-up apps – and hey, Grindr alone has around 100,000 Aussie members — heads up: the SMH says hackers have found a way to impersonate users and log-into your account. Updated
The apps founder, Joel, Simkhai, says both apps will be patched “over the new few days” ahead of a full security overhaul in the weeks to come.
Last week, the SMH showed Simkhai a website created by the hacker(s) mid-last year that exposed several security vulnerabilities. The site has since been taken down. The paper says “the hacker changed the profile picture of numerous Sydney Grindr users to explicit images” and one user was banned because this violates the service agreement. [SMH]
Here’s an official statement that Gizmodo Australia has received from Grindr CEO, Joel Simkhai:
Like other responsible companies, we don’t comment on specifics of security enhancements or allegations about network issues – that wouldn’t serve the security of our users, our networks, or web security in general. As a result of Grindr’s ongoing investigation, we took legal and technological actions to block a site that violated our terms of service. This site impacted a small number of primarily Australian Grindr users and it remains shut down. Blendr users were not affected by this.
We continuously make improvements to our platform to increase security across our networks. We are releasing a mandatory update to our apps over the next few days to enhance security. When the update is available, users will be notified via in-app messaging, on Twitter and on the Grindr blog. Our users can be assured that Grindr does not retain chat history, credit card information, or addresses – and no such information was ever compromised.