4chan Hack Exposes Women’s Data in Major Breach of Popular Safety App for Dating, Tea
Women’s Safety on Dating App Tea Compromised by 4chan Hackers
In an unprecedented data breach, the personal information of approximately 72,000 users of the woman-only dating safety app, Tea, has been exposed. The compromised data includes passports, selfies, driver’s licenses, and various images from user posts, comments, and direct messages.
Launched in 2023, Tea was designed to enable women to share information about men in their vicinity for safety purposes. Gaining significant popularity recently, the app reached the top of the App Store ranking this week. With over 4 million users worldwide, it has garnered both praise and criticism from various quarters.
According to a report by 404 Media, data from the app was discovered on an exposed cloud database hosted on Google’s mobile app development platform, Firebase. Users on the notorious anonymous imageboard 4chan are said to have accessed this illicit data, posting users’ selfies and identities online.
In response to the incident, Tea acknowledged that approximately 72,000 images had been compromised. These included 13,000 selfies and pieces of photo ID submitted for account verification, as well as 59,000 images from users’ posts, comments, and direct messages. The company clarified that the affected data was from two years ago, implying that recent sign-ups may not have been impacted. No phone numbers or email addresses are believed to have been compromised.
The alleged users on 4chan claimed that the user data was stored in what is known as a “public bucket,” a storage container whose contents can be accessed without authentication or authorization. 404 Media reports that the bucket linked by 4chan users matches the one they discovered in Tea’s app source code, although Tea has yet to officially address these claims.
In an official statement, Tea announced that it has engaged third-party cybersecurity experts and is working tirelessly to secure its systems. Additional security measures have been implemented, and the data issue has reportedly been resolved.
4chan, notorious for its involvement in numerous high-profile personal data leaks over the years, once hosted images of multiple Hollywood celebrities due to a significant security lapse in Apple’s iCloud. More recently, the imageboard suffered a major cyberattack that went offline for two weeks and exposed its source code.
