Domestic Abuse Prevention App Exposes Victims in Massive Data Breach

guest · Jun 27, 2020

Domestic Abuse Victims Exposed in Cloud Misconfiguration
June 26, 2020
https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/domestic-abuse-victims-cloud/

Thousands of domestic violence victims have had their emergency distress messages exposed after a developer misconfigured a back-end AWS bucket.

Researchers at vpnMentor led by Noam Rotem and Ran Locar found the voice recordings stored on a publicly accessible AWS S3 bucket.
They were traced back to Aspire News, an application built by US non-profit When Georgia Smiled, which features an emergency help section via which domestic abuse victims can send their distress messages. It’s backed by US TV celebrity and clinical psychologist Dr Phil.
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In total, the researchers found around 230MB of data, containing around 4000 voice recordings [...] However, the data exposed in the voice recordings was highly sensitive, including victims’ full names and home addresses, details of their circumstances and their abusers’ names and personal details.

“Had malicious or criminal hackers accessed these recordings, they could be weaponized against both victims and abusers to pursue blackmail and extortion campaigns,” said vpnMentor.
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Report: Domestic Abuse Prevention App Exposes Victims in Massive Data Breach

vpnMentor’s research team, led by renowned analysts Noam Rotem and Ran Locar, recently discovered an incredibly sensitive data breach originating from the domestic violence prevention app Aspire News App.

Every data breach creates a degree of risk for those affected. However, an app built for domestic abuse victims has a much greater responsibility to its users. Aspire News App was built to keep victims safe, but by not protecting their identities, the app risked putting them in even more danger.
This data breach is a lesson to all developers, especially those creating apps for domestic abuse victims or other at-risk groups, that data privacy must be a priority at all times.
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