A serious security vulnerability has been discovered in the Ring Neighbors app that could leak a users’ location and address. Ring deployed a fix after being notified of the vulnerability affecting the application.
Ring Neighbors App Vulnerability
In a recent report, TechCrunch has disclosed a vulnerability affecting the Ring Neighbors app.
Ring launched the “Neighbors” application for all users back in 2018, similar to apps like Nextdoor and Citizen, allowing users to communicate with each other regarding different crimes or to alert the law enforcement and neighborhood about some safety issue.
As revealed, the app lets users make public posts that may often include videos from Ring cameras and doorbells. However, these posts never expose the name and exact locations.
However, due to a vulnerability, it became possible to retrieve the precise location of the users via the posts. The retrieved data might even include the exact latitudes and longitudes along with the home addresses – all of that fetched from Ring servers.
Also, exploiting the glitch could even allow estimating the location from the previous posts by tracking a unique number. As TechCrunch explained,
Every post was tied to a unique number generated by the server that incremented by one each time a user created a new post. Although the number was hidden from view to the app user, the sequential post number made it easy to enumerate the location data from previous posts — even from users who aren’t geographically nearby.
Ring Fixed The Glitch
While it was a serious glitch, TechCrunch has confirmed that the vendors have patched the flaw. Besides, Ring confirmed no active exploitation of this glitch that could have risked the security of millions of users. According to their statement,
At Ring, we take customer privacy and security extremely seriously. We fixed this issue soon after we became aware of it. We have not identified any evidence of this information being accessed or used maliciously.
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