I hacked a dating app (and how not to treat a security researcher)

https://alexschapiro.com/blog/security/vulnerability/2025/04/21/startups-need-to-take-security-seriously

by bearsyankees • 1 year ago

570 311 1 year ago

swyx• 1 year ago

Since then, I have reached out multiple times (on March 5 and March 13) seeking updates on remediation and user notification plans. Unfortunately, as of today’s publication date (April 21, 2025), I have been met with radio silence. To my knowledge, Cerca has not publicly acknowledged this incident or informed users about this vulnerability, despite their earlier assurances to me. They also never followed up with me following our call and ignored all my follow up emails.

there can always be another side to this story but also wtf. this kind of shit makes me want to charles-proxy every new app i run because who knows what security any random startup has

genewitch5• 1 year ago

I'd not heard of Charles Proxy nor gobuster.

Years ago there was a firmware for mango travel routers that let you MITM anything connected to it, and i bought two of them, and then the information about how to set it up disappeared (i can't find it). the GL.iNet mango travel routers, is what i mean. I have one wireguarded with the switch set to shut off access or wireguard only; the other one is for IOT devices and is connected via 10mbit, so even if someone managed to hack one of the two IOT things here they couldn't exfil very much, and i'd notice the blinking.

andrewmcwatters2• 1 year ago

Charles Proxy has been in the industry for many years now. It's a common tool for basic reverse engineering.

xutopia• 1 year ago

That's crazy to not have responded to his repeated requests!

benzible2• 1 year ago

As someone managing a relatively low-profile SaaS app, I get constant reports from "security researchers" who just ran automated vulnerability scanners and are seeking bounties on minor issues. That said, it's inexcusable - they absolutely need to take these reports seriously and distinguish between scanner spam and legitimate security research like this.

Update: obviously I just skimmed this, per responses below.

bee_rider2• 1 year ago

It sounds like they actually met with him, patched the issues, and then didn’t respond afterwards. IMO that is quite rude of them toward him, but they do seem to have taken the issue itself somewhat seriously.

sshine• 1 year ago

They already met with him and acknowledged the problem. So their lack of follow-up is an attempt to push things under the rug. Users deserve to know that their data was compromised. In some places of the world it is a crime to not report a data leak.

nick2383• 1 year ago

Pardon sir, I see you have:

* Port 443 exposed to the internets. This can allow attackers to gain access to information you have. $10k fee for discovery

* Your port 443 responds with "Server: AmazonS3" header. This can allow attackers to identify your hosting company. $10k fee for discovery.

Please remit payment and we will offer instructions for remediation.

moonlet• 1 year ago

Not really if they don’t have any security or even devsecops yet… if they just have devs and those devs are people who are relatively junior / just out of school, I could unfortunately absolutely see this happening

mytailorisrich2• 1 year ago

A company has no duty to report to you about just because you kindly notified them of a vulnerability in their software.

During our conversation, the Cerca team acknowledged the seriousness of these issues, expressed gratitude for the responsible disclosure, and assured me they would promptly address the vulnerabilities and inform affected users.

Well that was the decent thing to do and they did it. Beyond that it is their internal problem and, especially they did fix the issue according to the article.

Engineers can be a little too open and naive. Perhaps his first contacts was with the technical team but then managament and the legal team got hold of the issue and shut it off.

kadoban2• 1 year ago

> During our conversation, the Cerca team acknowledged the seriousness of these issues, expressed gratitude for the responsible disclosure, and assured me they would promptly address the vulnerabilities and inform affected users.
Well that was the decent thing to do and they did it. Beyond that it is their internal problem and, especially they did fix the issue according to the article.

They didn't inform anyone, as far as I can tell. Especially users need(ed) to be informed.

It's also at least good practice to let security researchers know schedule of when it's safe to inform the public, otherwise in the future disclosure will be chaotic.

pixl9712• 1 year ago

A company has no duty to report to you about just because you kindly notified them of a vulnerability in their software.

Then you have no duty to report the vuln to the company and instead should feel free to disclose it to the world.

A little politeness goes a long ways on both sides.

soco• 1 year ago

It doesn't even look that they tried to secure anything initially. Security by design? Ha.

sherdil2022• 1 year ago

They might not have a playbook on how to handle such reports. Doesn’t mean they shouldn’t respond. They are also probably sh*t scared about legal ramifications - but not responding only makes them look even worse. None-the-less it is amazing how many of these products and services don’t put security and user privacy first.

Open for discussion - What would make them pay attention?

camcil2• 1 year ago

Affecting their bottom-line via litigation, less usage, whatever...

bravoetch• 1 year ago

I think most companies have a weak playbook for this kind of interaction. I once bought a product (and I'm going to be deliberately vague) from a company whose customers are mostly very famous people around the globe. The URL for my order included the order number, and that page showed everything about my order and my PII. Naturally I tried changing the order number, and wowzers I was able to see emails, phones, addresses, contacts for the PA/agent and sometimes direct contact info for the ordering party.

When I contacted the company about this, they didn't thank me or really acknowledge the problem. They fixed it about a month later by requiring login to view order URLs. I feel like they should have let their customers know all their PII data was exposed - I know they didn't, I never got such a notification.

squigz• 1 year ago

Fines that are enough to actually hurt, and regulations that force companies to actually secure PII.

If they're scared of such things, then maybe they shouldn't be making and marketing a dating app. It's not 2003 anymore, and this isn't some innocent app - they're collecting information on passports and sexual preferences for thousands of people. They should be aware of the responsibility that ought to come with that.

tuwtuwtuwtuw2• 1 year ago

I m not sure I understand properly. Did he try to hack a random service he encountered? Is that even legal? Where I live (Sweden) it's definitely not legal.

bink• 1 year ago

It's become a bit of a grey area thanks to most large companies having bug bounty programs now. I think some researchers just assume that all companies are OK with testing against their production services. IMHO it's almost certainly illegal, but simply won't be enforced unless the hacker/researcher does something malicious.

janalsncm• 1 year ago

If only all hackers lived in jurisdictions which enforce anti-hacking laws. If I am making an app, I’m not going to rely on the police to enforce cybersecurity.

charcircuit• 1 year ago

It's not legal in America either. And he is posting with what may be his real name which adds extra risk.

bee_rider2• 1 year ago

I’m not in security (thank goodness, it sounds like a legal minefield). It sounds like this system was so wildly insecure that… I actually kinda wonder what laws specifically he broke.

If you just text out passwords to anybody who asks, are they really doing unauthorized access? Lol.

I’m sure it was illegal somehow, though.

secalex3• 1 year ago

IANAL and this is not legal advice, but you probably fine reverse engineering a mobile app and intercepting your own network traffic. He was doing ok until he started enumerating IDs in their database, at which point he started venturing into the territory that got weev 3.5 yrs.

https://www.wired.com/2013/03/att-hacker-gets-3-years/

I am not endorsing this interpretation of the CFAA, but this kid needs a lawyer.

tptacek6• 1 year ago

I mean, he ventured in that direction, but until he discloses PII and leaks evidence of his intent that's the extent of the similarity: directional. People on message boards drastically underrate the importance of intent evidence in criminal cases; they all want there to be some hard-and-fast rule like "if you can see it in the URL, and you don't use a single-quote character to break SQL with it, it's fair game", which is not at all how it works.

camcil2• 1 year ago

In a data conscious world, the complete and utter disregard for PII and lack of competency in design and implementation would result in catastrophic business failure.

They may have "patched" the ability to exploit it in this way, but the plaintext data is still there in that same fragile architecture and still being handled by the same org that made all of these same fundamental mistakes in the first place. Yikes.

hiatus3• 1 year ago

In a data conscious world, the complete and utter disregard for PII and lack of competency in design and implementation would result in catastrophic business failure.

As you are probably well aware, we do not live in that world. Companies like Equifax can suffer breaches exposing the personal information of millions and stock still goes up.

baxtr2• 1 year ago

PII data breaches, especially PHI data can lead to high financial losses, mostly in the US through litigation. Fines in the EU are low in comparison.

Companies don’t like to talk about this, and they bury these costs deep down in their financial statements. But trust me, they’re quite substantial.

CobrastanJorji• 1 year ago

Sorry about that. Please fill out this class action postcard, and, if approved, you will receive up to two years of identity protection services provided by Equifax (to be served concurrently with any other court-ordered two years of identity protection services), or, if you have financial damages you can conclusively prove are directly linked to this specific identity disclosure, you may mail your evidence to the provided address for up to $1000 in restitution, pending arbitration.

ngangaga• 1 year ago

It's worth noting that companies that are too big to fail (as I assume credit bureaus are considered) are great places to park money.

92834092324• 1 year ago

There's no penalty for failing at privacy and security so companies would rather play the odds that they will be fine than invest in proper practices. Alex says Cerca is being misleading when it comes to encryption but it seems to me they are outright lying and will likely face no consequences for it. In a more just world, this would trigger so many regulatory and compliance audits.

mooreds2• 1 year ago

There's no penalty for failing at privacy and security

I wouldn't say there's no penalty (they might have to pay for a year of identity theft protection or a fine).

I agree that the consequences are not in line with the damage to the public or customer base.

MaKey• 1 year ago

The GDPR allows for huge fines, so for companies operating in Europe there is an incentive to take privacy and security seriously.

brazzy• 1 year ago

Namely, up to 20 million EUR or 4% of the previous year's revenue, whichever is larger.

thesuitonym• 1 year ago

Alex says Cerca is being misleading when it comes to encryption but it seems to me they are outright lying and will likely face no consequences for it.

Trasmitting information via HTTPS is usually enough to say your app uses "encryption and other industry-standard measures to protect your data."

edm0nd2• 1 year ago

I have been met with radio silence.

Thats when its time to inform them you are dumping the vuln to the public in 90 days due to their silence.

92834092324• 1 year ago

Good way to get yourself sued and have possible criminal charges brought up to you.

b8• 1 year ago

Which has never happened before and if it does then the EFF would back you presumably.

edm0nd2• 1 year ago

most certainly not (at least in the US).

I'm so tired of researchers being ignored when they bring a serious vuln to a company to be met with silence and/or resistance on top of them never alerting their users about it.

Buttons8402• 1 year ago

Yeah. Security researchers face the threat of lawsuits constantly, while those who build insecure apps face no consequences.

We are literally sacrificing national security for the convenience of wealthy companies.

hbn• 1 year ago

That's more of a punishment to innocent users than the business

kenjackson2• 1 year ago

True. Maybe let them know you will be directly contacting each user and letting them know that this service has exposed their personal information to hackers.

nick2383• 1 year ago

Disclosure is good for the 'innocent users' as they are made aware that their data may have been leaked (who knows if the company can do the sufficient auditing and forensics to detect total scraping), rather than just being oblivious because the company just didn't bother to tell them.

ericmcer• 1 year ago

This is a rare case where the leak is so egregious he could actually reach out to all the users themselves to let them know. Especially the ones with passport info.

OutOfHere• 1 year ago

There is no vulnerability here. It's just out in the open.

myself248• 1 year ago

Imagine if they tried to claim that. "Everything was just out on the front lawn, you can't blame us for not locking the door because we didn't even have a door!"

blantonl• 1 year ago

Returning the OTP in the request API response is wild. Like why?

mooreds2• 1 year ago

I too am bewildered.

Maybe to make it easier to build the form accepting the OTP? Oversight?

I can't think of any other reasons.

Vuska• 1 year ago

Oversight. Frameworks tend to make it easy to make an API endpoint by casting your model to JSON or something, but it's easy to forget you need to make specific fields hidden.

ksala_• 1 year ago

My best guess would be some form of testing before they added sending the "sending a message" part to the API. Build the OTP logic, the scaffolding... and add a way to make sure it returns what you expect. But yes absolutely wild.

Alex-Programs2• 1 year ago

I assume that whoever wrote it just has absolutely no mental model of security, has never been on the attacking side or realised that clients can't be trusted, and only implemented the OTP authentication because they were "going through the motions" that they'd seen other people implement.

matja• 1 year ago

Eliminate your database costs with this one easy trick!

hectormalot• 1 year ago

One reason I could think of is that they may return the database (or cache, or something else) response after generating and storing the OTP. Quick POCs/MVPs often use their storage models for API responses to save time, and then it is an easy oversight...

oulu2006• 1 year ago

that's my first thought at as well - like a basic CRUD operation that returns the row that was created as a response.

ceejayoz2• 1 year ago

Save a HTTP request, and faster UX! What's not to love?

When Pinterest's new API was released, they were spewing out everything about a user to any app using their OAuth integration, including their 2FA secrets. We reported and got a bounty, but this sort of shit winds up in big companies' APIs, who really should know better.

MBCook2• 1 year ago

So the UI can check if what they enter is correct.

It’s very sensible and an obvious solution if you don’t think about the security of it.

A dating app is one of the most dangerous kinds of app to make due to all the necessary PII. this is horrible.

ryanisnan• 1 year ago

if you don’t think about the security of it.

This is big brain energy. Why bother needing to make yet another round trip request when you can just defer that nonsense to the client!

pydry• 1 year ago

Smacks of vibe coding

benmmurphy• 1 year ago

I’ve seen banks where the OTP code is generated on the client and then sent to the server.

gwbas1c4• 1 year ago

It appears that the OTP is sent from "the response from triggering the one-time password".

I suspect it's a framework thing; they're probably directly serializing an object that's put in the database (ORM or other storage system) to what's returned via HTTP.

bearsyankees7• 1 year ago

https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2025/04/24/yale-student-expos...

^another article on this

ahaferburg• 1 year ago

Developers should use best practices, but they may not be sufficient, he added. “Keeping data secure is an unsolved problem,” he said.

Oh, ok. Too bad, I guess.

michaelteter3• 1 year ago

Not excusing this is any way, but this app is apparently a fairly junior effort by university students. While it should make every effort to follow good security (and communication) practices, I'd not be too hard on them considering how some big VC funded "adult" companies behave when presented with similar challenges.

https://georgetownvoice.com/2025/04/06/georgetown-students-c...

peterldowns• 1 year ago

I hear you but if you're processing passports and sexual preferences you have to at least respond to the security researcher telling you how you're leaking them to absolutely anyone. This is a total clusterfuck and there are zero excuses for the lack of security here.

genewitch5• 1 year ago

i have an idea, if you don't know anything about app security, don't make an app. "Whataboutism" not-withstanding, this actually made me feel a little ill, and your comment didn't help. I have younger friends that use dating sites and having their information exposed to whoever wants it is gross, and the people who made it should feel bad.

They should feel bad about not communicating with the "researcher" after the fact, too. If i had been blown off by a "company" after telling them everything was wide open to the world for the taking, the resulting "blog post" would not be so polite.

STOP. MAKING. APPS.

dylan6043• 1 year ago

Stop pushing POCs into PROD.

There's nothing wrong with making your POC/MVP with all of the cool logic that shows what the app will do. That's usually done to gain funding of some sort, but before releasing. Part of the releasing stage should be a revamped/weaponized version of the POC, and not the damn POC itself. The weaponized version should have security stuff added.

That's much better than telling people stop making apps.

imiric2• 1 year ago

You're shouting into the void. The people making this type of product have zero regard for their users' data, and best engineering or security practices. They're using AI to pump out a product as quickly as possible, and if it doesn't work (i.e. makes them money), they'll do it again with something else.

This can only be solved by regulation.

ghssds• 1 year ago

Programming should require a gouvernment-emited license reserved to alumni of duly certified schools. Possession of a turing-complete compiler of interpreter without permission should be a felony.

yibg• 1 year ago

End of the day it's an ROI analysis (using the term loosely here, more of a gut feel). What is the cost and benefits of making an app more secure vs pushing out an insecure version faster. Unfortunately in today's business and funding climate, the latter has better pay off (for most things anyways).

Until the balance of incentives changes, I don't see any meaningful change in behavior unfortunately.

rs186• 1 year ago

There is a point to your comment, but I am afraid you are shouting at the wrong thing.

Instead, I think this is the fair approach: anyone is free to make a website/app/VR world whatever, but if it stores any kind of PII, you had better know what you are doing. The problem is not security. The problem is PII. If someone's AWS key got hacked, leaked and used by others, well it's bad, but that's different from my personal information getting leaked and someone applying for a credit card on my behalf.

voytec2• 1 year ago

I've also hit this link trying to get any info on "Cerca". It's from April 2025 and praises app created two months earlier. It looks like a LLM-hallucinated garbage. OP's entry mentions contacting Cerca team in February. So either this entry is about a flaw detected at launch date or some weird scheme.

Nonetheless: "two months old vulnerability" and "two months old students-made app/service".

michaelteter3• 1 year ago

Ah that's a shame.

It's hard to tell these days what is real.

Linkedin shows 2024 founded, and 2-10 employees. And that same Linkedin page has a post which directly links to this blurb: https://www.readfeedme.com/p/three-college-seniors-solved-th...

The date of this article is May 2025, and it references an interview with the founders.

imiric2• 1 year ago

That sounds like you're excusing them.

You know what else was an app built by university students? The Facebook. We're all familiar with the "dumb fucks" quote, with Meta's long history of abusing their users' PII, and their poor security practices that allowed other companies to abuse it.

So, no. This type of behavior must not be excused, and should ideally be strongly regulated and fined appropriately, regardless of the age or experience of the founders.

barbazoo• 1 year ago

How is one supposed to know that it's just a bunch of script kiddies we shouldn't be too hard on if their apps get released under "Cerca Applications, LLC".

tmtvl2• 1 year ago

I vehemently disagree. 'Well, they didn't know what they were doing, so we shouldn't judge them too harshly' is a silly thing to say. They didn't know what they were doing _and still went through with it_. That's an aggravating, not extenuating, factor in my book. Kind of like if a driver kills someone in an accident and then turns out not to have a license.

dmitrygr• 1 year ago

+1: if you cannot do security, you have no business making dating apps. The kind of data those collect can ruin lives overnight. This is not a theory, here is a recent example: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c74nlgyv7r4o

LadyCailin5• 1 year ago

This is exactly why I think software engineering should require a licensing requirement, much like civil engineering. I get that people will complain about that destroying all sorts of things, and it might, yes, but fight me. Crap like this is exactly why it should be a requirement, and why you won’t convince me that the idea is not in general a good one.

mmanfrin• 1 year ago

They didn't know what they were doing _and still went through with it_

You don't know what you don't know; sometimes people can think they do know what they're doing and they just haven't encountered situations otherwise. We were all new to programming once; no one would ever become a solid engineer if they prevented themselves from building anything out of fear of doing something wrong that they did not account for out of lack of experience.

michaelteter3• 1 year ago

Still not excusing them, but these HN responses are very hypocritical.

US tech is built on the "go fast, break things" mentality. Companies with huge backers routinely fail at security, and some of them actually spend money to suppress those who expose the companies' poor privacy/security practices.

If anything, college kids could at least reasonably claim ignorance, whereas a lot of HN folks here work for companies who do far worse and get away with it.

Some companies, some unicorns, knowingly and wilfully break laws to get ahead. But they're big, and people are getting rich working for them, so we don't crucify them.

johnfn• 1 year ago

But no one was killed here, so your comparison really falls flat to me - there’s a reason we have a sliding scale of punishments that scale to the crime, and security issues are nowhere near the same level of severity as murder. It feels more like fining kids for putting up a lemonade stand without a business license.

paulddraper• 1 year ago

The difference is…this isn’t an automobile and the accident isn’t fatal.

yard20103• 1 year ago

These guys should probably study something else.

selcuka2• 1 year ago

Fair point, but come on. Not returning the OTP (which is supposed to be a secret) in the response payload is common sense, whether you are a seasoned developer or a high school student.

It is also a commercial product, not something they made for fun:

    In-App Purchases
    - Cerca App $9.99
    - Cerca App 3 month $9.99
    - 10 Swipes $2.99
    - 3 Swipes $0.99
    - 5 swipes $1.99
    - 3 Searches $1.99
    - 10 Searches $3.99
    - 5 Searches $2.99

root_axis• 1 year ago

Sadly, it's not common sense. I've worked with dozens of people who just throw arbitrary state into front-end response payloads because they're lazy and just push to the front-end whatever comes from the service API.

cAtte_• 1 year ago

this stops applying when your cute little app starts storing people's passports

mbs159• 1 year ago

Although I do agree with the sentiment, you should handle sensitive information if you are not capable of properly doing so.

koakuma-chan5• 1 year ago

I thought Apple was checking apps? How did this go through? In any sane jurisdiction exposing PII like that is illegal.

hackan2• 1 year ago

nobody does a free security checkup xD not even apple

tough2• 1 year ago

free? I thought they still had their 30% racket and wait while we review 3 months pipeline going for their walled gardens

gagik_co• 1 year ago

Apple mainly checks for obvious malware API calls on device, it would really be out of its scope to check the backend security for every app ever.

Lucasoato• 1 year ago

I don't think the App Store provider should be blamed for a security posture that is just wrong by design. The company is responsible to guarantee a meaningful degree of security for their user data.

efdee2• 1 year ago

Remind me what the 30% markup is for, again?

nixpulvis10• 1 year ago

This is why Apple security theater leads people to a false sense of security.

Better to make secure operating systems that inform users of bad access patterns and let the developers be free to produce.

Nothing protects you from giving info to a broken backend though, so people should be more cautious and repercussions for insecure backends should be higher.

nixpulvis10• 1 year ago

People need to be forced to think twice before taking in such sensitive information as a passport or even just addresses. This sort of thing cannot be allowed to be brushed off as just a bunch of kids making an app.

koakuma-chan5• 1 year ago

Were they not using some kind of third party identity verification service? That's what I usually see apps do. Don't tell me those third party services still share your ID with the app (like the actual images)?

nixpulvis10• 1 year ago

Read the article. They clearly have their own OTP setup.

But if they are asking for your passport, then they have access to it. It's not a third party asking and providing them with some checkmark or other reduced risk data.

jonny_eh2• 1 year ago

There should to be some kind of government operated identity confirmation service that is secure/private.

Or by someone "government-like" such as Apple or Google.

clifflocked• 1 year ago

OAuth exists and can be used to confirm someone's identity by linking their Google account.

behringer3• 1 year ago

when I worked for the government, within 2 months they had leaked all of my data to the black market.

Governments should not be confirming shit.

steeeeeve2• 1 year ago

Government is the worst possible solution to every problem.

(not an attack on you. I have to say that every time I see someone say anything along the lines of "the government should do it")

nixpulvis10• 1 year ago

I would rather see an FDPA (Federal Data Protection Administration) which goes after people who get this stuff wrong.

kelnos3• 1 year ago

And for things like passport or other ID details, there's also no reason to expose them publicly at all after they've been entered. If you want an API available to fetch the data so you can display it in the UI, there's no need to include the full passport/ID number; at the very least it can be obscured with only the last few digits sent back via the API.

But for something like a dating site, It's enough for the API to just return a boolean verified/not-verified for the ID status (or an enum of something like 'not-verified', 'passport', 'drivers-license', etc.). There's no real need to display any of the details to the client/UI.

(In contrast with, say, and airline app where you need to select an identity document for immigration purposes, where you'd want to give the user more details so they can make the choice. But even then, as they do in the United app, they only show the last few digits of the passport number... hopefully that's all that's sent over their internal API as well.)

VBprogrammer• 1 year ago

The UK government are trying really hard to mandate IDs for access to porn sites. Can't wait for that to blow up in their faces.

pixl9712• 1 year ago

"They" don't care, the entire point of many of these laws is to increase the friction and fear of being disclosed that you don't visit these sites in the first place.

webninja• 1 year ago

Generally speaking, the UK government doesn’t care about it's citizens. That’s why so many left to the USA for a better life.

vincvinc• 1 year ago

See; GDPR

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...

nixpulvis10• 1 year ago

The US desperately needs similar legislation.

12_throw_away• 1 year ago

Hot take: just like real engineers, there should be a Software Engineer licensing exam that's legally required before you can handle PII ... because this is the alternative.

Before I was allowed to hand out juice cups at my kids' preschool, I had to do a 2 hour food safety course and was subject to periodic inspections. That is infinity% more oversight than I received when storing highly sensitive information for ~10^5 users.

aDyslecticCrow2• 1 year ago

A few European countries' "masters of computer science" is just a normal "engineering" degree with a focus on software for any speciality credits. I can call myself an "engineer", even though my software profession does not value the distinction.

Though I'm sceptical it would help. API design is generally not taught in university courses, and perhaps shouldn't (too specific).

I instead feel that GDPR has already done a lot of heavy lifting. By raising the price of "find out", people got a bit more careful about the "fuck around" part. It seems to push companies to take it seriously.

The step two is forcing companies to take security breaches and security disclosures seriously, which CRA (Cyber Resilience Act) may help.... at the cost of swamps of byrocratic overhead that is also included ofcourse.

pixl9712• 1 year ago

Bureaucracy is the cost of human laziness...

I mean, do you trust that the chemical industry will self regulate and keep dangerous chemicals out of your drinking water?

Then why do we trust software companies to keep you and your data safe?

We will get more regulations over time no matter how much we complain about it because people are rather lazy at the end of the day and more money for less work is a powerful motivator.

gwbas1c4• 1 year ago

Your comment should be the top post in this thread. Unfortunately, there is a group of HN readers who downvote all comments that suggest we (software developers) should be licensed, even though plenty of other fields require it.

I think we'll need to start pushing on lawmakers.

mtlynch3• 1 year ago

This is a pretty confusing writeup.

First things first, let’s log in. They only use OTP-based sign in (just text a code to your phone number), so I went to check the response from triggering the one-time password. BOOM – the OTP is directly in the response, meaning anyone’s account can be accessed with just their phone number.

They don't explain it, but I'm assuming that the API is something like api.cercadating.com/otp/<phone-number>, so you can guess phone numbers and get OTP codes even if you don't control the phone numbers.

The script basically just counted how many valid users it saw; if after 1,000 consecutive IDs it found none, then it stopped. So there could be more out there (Cerca themselves claimed 10k users in the first week), but I was able to find 6,117 users, 207 who had put their ID information in, and 19 who claimed to be Yale students.

I don't know if the author realizes how risky this is, but this is basically what weev did to breach AT&T, and he went to prison for it.[0] Granted, that was a much bigger company and a larger breach, but I still wouldn't boast publicly about exploiting a security hole and accessing the data of thousands of users without authorization.

I'm not judging the morality, as I think there should be room for security researchers to raise alarms, but I don't know if the author realizes that the law is very much biased against security researchers.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goatse_Security#AT&T/iPad_emai...

tptacek6• 1 year ago

Read the original complaint in the Auernheimer case. Prosecutors had (extensive) intent evidence that is unlikely to exist here. The defendants in that case were also accused of disclosing the underlying PII, which is not something that appears to have happened here.

mtlynch3• 1 year ago

Yeah, I agree Auernheimer was a much more attractive target for prosecution, but do you think this student is legally safe in what they're doing here?

SoftTalker3• 1 year ago

I was going to say the headline of the post, "I hacked..." could almost be taken as a confession. But that's not the actual title of the linked article. I'm almost tempted to flag this submission for clickbait embellishment in the title.

lima• 1 year ago

They don't explain it, but I'm assuming that the API is something like api.cercadating.com/otp/<phone-number>, so you can guess phone numbers and get OTP codes even if you don't control the phone numbers.

They mention guessing phone numbers, and then the API call for sending the OTP... literally just returns the OTP.

mtlynch3• 1 year ago

Yeah, I guess there's no reason for the API to ever return the OTP, but the severity depends on how you call the API. If the API is `api.cercadating.com/otp/<unpredictable-40-character-token>`, then that's not so bad. If it's `api.cercadating.com/otp/<guessable four-digit number>` that's a different story.

From context, I assume it's closer to the latter, but it would have been helpful for the author to explain it a bit better.

some_furry• 1 year ago

https://archive.ph/rOQVe

phyzix57615• 1 year ago

Imagine every time you entered a specific physical location you would increase your exposure to a detrimental disease. After only entering a couple of times you've contracted this disease and each subsequent visit to this place makes the illness worse.

A few people try to warn you but you choose not to listen and, in fact, you recruit the government to make it easier to enter such places with safeguards that don't actually protect you from the disease and encourage you to enter more frequently.

You're then surprised why you're ill to the brink of death and blame the location as the sole cause for your ails. Yes, the location is to blame but so are you for continuing to enter even after getting sick.

Why do you do this? Because you want something. Convenience, pleasure, a distraction, etc. But you refuse to acknowledge that its killing you.

This is how we should view optional services that require us to give our PII data in exchange for hours of attention-grabbing content. They're designed to sell your eyeballs and data to advertisers. You know this already but you can't say no. You're sick and refuse to acknowledge it.

bongodongobob• 1 year ago

But a dating app specifically needs all kinds of personal info. That's like, what it's for.

phyzix57615• 1 year ago

But its your choice to use it right?

RussianCow• 1 year ago

This is how we should view optional services that require us to give our PII data in exchange for hours of attention-grabbing content.

This is a nice fantasy, but realistically it means you shouldn't use probably 90% of services out there, which isn't reasonable for most people. Plus, there are plenty of companies with treasure troves full of data on you that have equally questionable data security/privacy practices that you've never even directly interacted with.

We need regulation. There is no other alternative. And we need to stop blaming victims of data breaches for companies not putting basic security measures in place. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect every company you interact with to securely store your sensitive data. If a place was physically making people ill like in your thought experiment, they wouldn't be around for very long; I think we should demand the same for our data.

phyzix57615• 1 year ago

No one is blaming the victims. Please read my comment again. What I'm saying is that regulation puts in guardrails that don't actually do anything to protect your data.

voytec2• 1 year ago

I'm flagging this submission. Look at the author[0], at the "Georgetown students..." (won't backlink again) post linked below stating that Cerca was 2 months old in April, and OP's post from April stating that they hacked this thing two months earlier.

It's some self-promo or whatever scheme/scam bullshit.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=alexschapiro.com

bearsyankees7• 1 year ago

Hi author here! Not exactly sure what you are talking about — I think I found this vulnerability pretty close to when the app first went public but not sure why that makes it a scam

And I posted this blog because I think people will find it interesting!

Happy to answer any other questions when I get back to my computer :)

bearsyankees7• 1 year ago

(Also more info here: https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2025/04/24/yale-student-expos...)

nik_0_0• 1 year ago

Posting the same link 4 times in 18 days, by the author, certainly seems like self-promo, but somehow allowed? I don't see any URL manipulation, and it certainly took off today. (I found it interesting!)

A&B testing of post names seems to lead some useful information ;)

I don't see your reference to "Georgetown students..." in either the website link or the user's submissions? Was it modified?

bearsyankees7• 1 year ago

Glad you found it interesting, yeah I was experimenting with different names and obviously this one was the best. Not trying to self-promo as I am not like selling any product but just thought people would enjoy the article! Sorry if I violated any of the unwritten HN norms... but glad people are reading it now and having interesting discussions

andrelaszlo• 1 year ago

Oops! Nice find!

To limit his legal exposure as a researcher, I think it would have been enough to create a second account (or ask a friend to create a profile and get their consent to access it).

You don't have to actually scrape the data to prove that there's an enumeration issue. Say your id is 12345, and your friend signs up and gets id 12357 - that should be enough to prove that you can find the id and access the profile of any user.

As others have said, accessing that much PII of other users is not necessary for verifying and disclosing the vulnerability.

ofjcihen3• 1 year ago

This is the standard and obvious way to go about things that most security researchers ignore.

While you can definitely want PII protected and scrape data to prove a point it’s unnecessary and hypocritical.

strunz• 1 year ago

Eh, part of assessing the vulnerability is how deep it goes. Showing that there were no gates or roadblocks to accessing all the data is a valid thing to research, otherwise they can later say "oh we hade rate limiting in place" or "we had network vulnerability scanners which would've prevented a wholesale leak".

SpaceL10n• 1 year ago

I worry about my own liability sometimes as an engineer at a small company. So many businesses operate outside of regulated industries where PCI or HIPAA don't apply. For smaller organizations, security is just an engineering concern - not an organizational mandate. The product team is focused on the features, the PM is focused on the timeline, QA is focused on finding bugs, and it goes on and on, but rarely is there a voice of reason speaking about security. Engineers are expected to deliver tasks on the board and litte else. If the engineers can make the product secure without hurting the timeline, then great. If not, the engineers end up catching heat from the PM or whomever.

They'll say things like...

"Well, how long will that take?"

or, "What's really the risk of that happening?"

or, "We can secure it later, let's just get the MVP out to the customer now"

So, as an employee, I do what my employer asks of me. But, if somebody sues my employer because of some hack or data breach, am I going to be personally liable because I'm the only one who "should have known better"?

hiatus3• 1 year ago

Are you an officer of the company? If not I would not think you could be personally liable.

sailfast• 1 year ago

I would personally want to know the law enough to protect myself, push back on anything illegal in writing, and then get written approval to disregard to be totally covered - but I understand that even this can be hard if you’re one or two devs deep at a startup or whatever. Personally, if I didn’t think they were pursuing legal work I’d leave.

kelnos3• 1 year ago

As much as I despise the "I was just following orders" defense, do make sure you get anything like that in writing: an email trail where you raise your concerns about the lack of security, with a response from a boss saying not to bother with it.

Not sure where you are located, but I don't know of any case where an individual rank-and-file employee has been held legally responsible for a data breach. (Hell, usually no one suffers any consequences for data breaches. At most the company suffers a token fine and they move on without caring.

hnlmorg• 1 year ago

do make sure you get anything like that in writing: an email trail where you raise your concerns about the lack of security, with a response from a boss saying not to bother with it.

A few years ago I was put in the situation where I needed to do this and it created a major shitstorm.

“I’m not putting that in writing” they said.

However it did have the desired effect and they backed down.

You do need to be super comfortable with your position in the company to pull that stunt though. This was for a UK firm and I was managing a team of DevOps engineers. So I had quite a bit of respect in the wider company as well as stronger employment rights. I doubt I’d have pulled this stunt if I was a much more replaceable software engineer in an American startup. And particularly not in the current job climate.

remus• 1 year ago

As an engineer I'm a small org I think it's our responsibility to educate the rest of the team about these risks and push to make sure they get engineering time to mitigate these issues. It's not easy, but it's important stuff that could sink the business if it's not taken seriously.

yieldcrv2• 1 year ago

not in my experience

pixl9712• 1 year ago

If it's an LLC/Corp you should be protected by the corporate veil unless you've otherwise documented you're committing criminal behavior.

But yea, the lack of security standards across organizations of all sizes is pitiful. Releasing new features always seems to come before ensuring good security practices.

SoftTalker3• 1 year ago

You're not really an engineer. You won't be signing any design plans certifying their safety, and you won't be liable when it's proven that they aren't safe.

kohbo• 1 year ago

Depends on your industry. Even if SWE's aren't out here getting PE's there is absolutely someone signing off on all things safety-related.

marcellus23• 1 year ago

engineer
noun
a person who designs, builds, or maintains engines, machines, or public works.

ungreased0675• 1 year ago

I would like to see laws that make storing PII as dangerous as storing nuclear waste. Leaks should result in near-certain bankruptcy for the company and legal jeopardy for the people responsible.

That’s the best way I can think of to align incentives correctly. Right now there’s very little downside to storing as much user information as possible. Data breach? Just tweet an apology and keep going.

hiatus3• 1 year ago

I would like to see laws that make storing PII as dangerous as storing nuclear waste.

This is a little extreme IMO. PII encompasses a lot of data, including benign things like email address stored only for authentication and contact purposes.

pixl9712• 1 year ago

I mean, we could consider email like light waste, can't dump it in the environment like plastic trash, but if you handle it correctly with cheap disposal methods it will be ok.

Things like photos of IDs/passports should be considered yellowcake.

gwbas1c4• 1 year ago

White collar jail?

That might be the only way to give the issue the attention it deserves.

AlienRobot• 1 year ago

the OTP is directly in the response

I forgot my password.

Type your username:

Your password is hunter2.

Vibes.

orphea2• 1 year ago

Many-many moons ago I saw a forum website that would tell

"Sorry, you can't use password qwerty123. This password is already used by user SweetLemon13115"

gxs• 1 year ago

FYI the Hinge app works the same way

I requested my data and all the image URLs are publicly accessible - and the URLs provided are both your own images and the images of anyone who’d ever viewed your profile

reliablereason• 1 year ago

The security is in the fact that you cant just list every single user and all their info. You would need to scrape the info.

A URL with a cryptic file name is theoretically just as secure as a a random password.

shayanbahal3• 1 year ago

I had a similar experience with another dating app, although they never got back to me. When I tried to get the founders attention by changing his bio to contact me text, they restored a backup lol

years later I saw their instagram ad and tried to see if the issue still exists, and yes it did. Basically anyone with the knowledge of their API endpoints (which is easy to find using the app-proxy-server) you have full on admin capabilities and access to all messages, matching, etc.

I wonder if I should go back and try again... :-?

cobalt60• 1 year ago

Why not disclose it as a responsible dev with contacts and move on.

pixl9712• 1 year ago

If a company is not responsible enough to follow up on security reports you should not follow up, but instead disclose it to the world.

yieldcrv2• 1 year ago

this is useful! I am considering building a dating app with its own twist and seeing the api endpoints this team went with is useful

under the hood they're all the same, just with different theming and market segmentation

andoando• 1 year ago

If they're sending the OTP to the user, its because the OTP is being checked client side, so you might have been able to just call the authentication endpoint directly.

joshstrange2• 1 year ago

More likely it's misconfiguration of some kind.

Perhaps a hold over from testing (where you don't always want to send the SMS). Maybe just the habit/pattern of returning the item you just created in the DB and not remembering to mark the field as private. There are a whole slew easy foot-guns. I'm not defending it but I doubt it's to do client-side validation, that would be insanity. It's easy enough to not notice a body on a response that you don't care about client side, "200? Cool, keep moving". It's still crazy they were returning the OTP and I sure hope it wasn't on purpose.

sillywabbit• 1 year ago

There's probably some benefit to having people who will tell you about security issues rather than exploit them. You can't really blame businesses / app devs for wanting to be left alone though.

throwaway314155• 1 year ago

what?

gwbas1c4• 1 year ago

FYI: This is more common than you think.

I briefly worked with a company where I had to painfully explain to the lead engineer that you can't trust anything that comes from the browser; because a hacker can curl whatever they want.

Our relationship deteriorated from there. Needless to say, I don't list the experience on my resume.

j45• 1 year ago

A real issue is how much data and functionality to access said data is exposed for the front end that could conveniently be held server side.

hamish-b• 1 year ago

I'm not sure how I hadn't heard about Charle's Proxy for iPhone before! I've done some light pentesting before and had to manually result to grepping for strings throughout the app binary. Glad to have found out about this, especially for when apps are only on iOS.

bearsyankees7• 1 year ago

Awesome glad to help!! It is a pretty good tool (unless apps use SSL pinning)

hoseja• 1 year ago

It used to be you matched yourself with babes if you had power over a dating app.

I hacked a dating app (and how not to treat a security researcher)

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