Image by Kev Costello, from Unsplash
Tea App Breach Exposes 1.1M Private Messages in Second Major Security Flaw
- Written by Kiara Fabbri Former Tech News Writer
- Fact-Checked by Sarah Frazier Former Content Manager
Tea, the women’s dating app, suffered its second data breach, revealing over one million private messages containing personal details.
In a rush? Here are the quick facts:
- Tea app’s second breach exposed 1.1 million private user messages.
- Sensitive chats include discussions on cheating, abortions, and phone numbers.
- Real identities were easy to uncover despite anonymous usernames.
This new breach exposed 1.1 million private messages between users, which revealed conversations about cheating partners, abortions, and personal details including phone numbers.
The independent researcher Kasra Rahjerdi discovered this issue, which 404Media then reviewed and verified the data.
Unlike the first breach , which involved an old Firebase database, this latest exposure involved a newer database and included messages as recent as last week. According to Rahjerdi, the flaw allowed any Tea user to use their API key to access the private chats.
“It’s hard to overstate how sensitive this data is and how it could put Tea’s users at risk if it fell into the wrong hands,” 404 Media wrote.
The anonymity feature on Tea did not protect users, since it was fairly simple to reveal their identities through their message content, such as sharing names, social media profiles, and phone numbers.
Some conversations include women discovering they’re dating the same man, others discuss abortions, or identify cheating partners by describing their cars. “I am his wife,” one message says. In another, a woman warns others about her fiancé.
Tea, which has over 1.6 million users and recently topped the App Store, says it has launched an investigation and contacted law enforcement. “We are continuing to work expeditiously to contain the incident and have launched a full investigation with assistance from external cybersecurity firms,” a spokesperson told 404 Media.
The issue persisted until late last week, according to the researcher.
Image by Matthieu Rochette, from Unsplash
Researchers Test How To Store Data On A Bird
- Written by Kiara Fabbri Former Tech News Writer
- Fact-Checked by Sarah Frazier Former Content Manager
In a bizarre new experiment, a researcher discovered that birds can store and reproduce complex data, including pictures, using just sound.
In a rush? Here are the quick facts:
- European starling mimics ultrasonic sounds to encode complex image data.
- Researchers used a spectrogram synthesizer to convert images into sounds.
- The starling replicated simplified sound patterns in the same frequency range.
The YouTuber Ben Jordan, who led this experiment, did so by observing a European starling nicknamed “The Mouth,” known for its remarkable ability to mimic sounds with high ultrasonic accuracy.
Ben explains in his video that it achieved this by converting a simple bird drawing into a series of high-frequency tones using a special tool called a spectrogram synthesizer.
“I drew a photo of a bird in a spectral synthesizer and put the sound on my phone to play for the Starling on the off chance that he’d like the sound enough to add to his vocabulary, which would effectively make himself capable of storing and transmitting image data.” Ben explained.
The researchers aimed to determine if the bird could learn and reproduce the sound, essentially encoding the image as vocal sounds.
The results were positive. When they listened to ultrasonic recordings, they found that the starling had copied a simplified version of the sound pattern.
“This little bird successfully learned and emulated the sound in the exact same frequency range that he heard it, effectively transferring about 176 kilobytes of uncompressed information.” Ben said. Although not perfect, this showed that birds could store and share data through their calls.
Ben explains key to the discovery was special audio gear that can capture sounds too high for humans to hear, including 192kHz ultrasonic microphones, time-stretching software to slow down the sounds without losing quality, and spectrogram analysis to visualize the bird’s singing.
Ben also noted, “Hypothetically, if this were an audible file transfer protocol that used a 10:1 data compression ratio, that’s nearly 2 megabytes of information per second”
For those interested in trying similar experiments, Ben recommends affordable tools like the AudioMoth ultrasonic recorder, Raspberry Pi with BirdNET-Pi software, and the free Merlin app by Cornell Lab.
Ben summed it up: “The fact that you could set up a speaker in your yard and conceivably store any amount of data in songbirds is crazy.”
