Domestic violence assistance app breached placing victims at risk

Domestic violence assistance app breached placing victims at risk

The app in the discussion is the Aspire News App which, among other data, also leaked victims’ voice recordings asking for help against their abuser.


Data breaches for long have been a problem for companies that store user data. At various times, this has resulted in highly confidential data being leaked harming the reputation of the firm involved.


One such incident has emerged again when the “Aspire News App” for Android developed by a US-based non-profit suffered a data breach as reported by researchers from vpnMentor.


See: 845GB of sensitive explicit data on niche dating apps users exposed online


The app provides news stories sourced from Yahoo and is focused on helping domestic violence victims by allowing them to make timely distress calls which are sent with the help of voice recordings accompanied by details including the following:


User address
Nature of emergency
Current location
Other critical information

Naturally, all of this data also needs to be stored somewhere, the answer for which is a database, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 bucket in this case. However, due to configuration security errors, the database was breached resulting in the loss of 4000 voice recordings ranging from September 2017 till now which could be viewed and download by anyone in the open.



Aspire News App



This led to personally identi ..

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