Thousands of Android and iOS Apps Are Leaking Sensitive Data, Says Report

From Mashable UK:

Millions of passwords, GPS locations, and financial records are sitting unprotected in plain sight — and yours could be one of them.
Researchers at Appthority, a mobile security firm, scanned both Android and iOS mobile apps that used Firebase databases to store their users’ data. For the uninitiated, Firebase is a popular cloud-based backend platform for mobile and web applications. The company was acquired by Google back in 2014, so it’s found a real user base among some of the top Android developers.
For their report, Appthority looked into more than 2.7 million mobile apps on both iOS and Android. It’s researchers found that of the 27,227 Android apps and 1,275 iOS apps storing their app’s data in Firebase’s backend database systems, 3,046 of these apps saved data within 2,271 unsecured databases that literally anyone could access. Out of those apps storing this data openly for anyone to see, 2,446 are on Android and the remaining 600 are iOS applications.

Read the Complete Article (via Mashaable UK)
See Also: Thousands of Apps Leak Sensitive Data via Misconfigured Firebase Backends (via Bleeping Computer)
Direct to Full Text Report (via Appthority)
2o pages; PDF.

Filed under: Data Files, News