User Data Leaked by Apps Thanks to Misconfigured Google Firebase Backends

Jul. 3, 2018

Data privacy is a very sensitive matter, especially in today’s world. While companies’ vouch to protect one’s data, often they are just false assurances. And if the latest reports are to be believed, personal data of millions of users has been leaked.

As reported bymobile security firm Appthority,thousands of iOS and Android mobile applications are exposing over 113 GBs of data via over 2,271 misconfigured Firebase databases.For those of you unaware, Firebase is a Backend-as-a-Service offering from Google which provides multiple APIs that developers can easily plug into their apps benefit from Google’s large-scale and high-performance cloud infrastructure to manage the app.

The types of data that were leaked are:

According to Appthority, these apps have been downloaded more than 620 million times on the Google Play Store, and share similar figures on iOS’ App Store. They’ve further stated that they’venotified Google before publishing the report, providing the list of affected applications along with the links to the publicly viewable databases.

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