Kevin Hertz, Voxox’s co-founder and chief technology officer, said in an email that the company is “looking into the issue and following standard data breach policy at the moment,” and that the company is “evaluating impact.”
“This is different from most breaches, due to the fact the data is temporary, so once it’s offline any data stolen isn’t very useful.” “My real concern here is the potential that this has already been abused,” said Katz. With access to the text message through the exposed database, hijacking an account could take seconds. In some cases, websites will only require a phone number to reset an account. The exposure to personal information and phone numbers notwithstanding, the ability to access two-factor codes in near-real-time could have put countless number of accounts at risk of hijack. “Yeah, this is very bad,” said Dylan Katz, a security researcher, who reviewed some of the findings. And, several small to mid-size hospitals and medical facilities sent reminders to patients about their upcoming appointments, and in some cases, billing inquiries.Yahoo also used the service to send some account keys by text message.
Several partners were sent their six-digit two-factor codes to log in to the company’s extranet corporate network.
We found a password sent in plaintext to a Los Angeles phone number by dating app Badoo.
But the sheer volume of messages processed through the platform per minute - as seen through the database’s visual front-end - suggests that this figure may be higher.Įach record was meticulously tagged and detailed, including the recipient’s cell phone number, the message, the Voxox customer who sent the message and the shortcode they used.Īmong our findings from a cursory review of the data: At the time of its closure, the database appeared to have a little over 26 million text messages year-to-date. But it’s firms like Voxox that act as a gateway and converting those codes into text messages, to be passed on to the cell networks for delivery to the user’s phone.Īfter an inquiry by TechCrunch, Voxox pulled the database offline. Often, app developers - like HQ Trivia and Viber - will employ technologies provided by firms like Telesign and Nexmo, either to verify a user’s phone number or to send a two-factor authentication code, for example. Most don’t think about what happens behind the scenes when you get a text message from a company, whether it’s an Amazon shipping notification or a two-factor code for your login. An example of one text message containing a user’s phone number and their Microsoft account reset code.