Popular Messaging App Of The Moment “Yo” Has Some Serious Security Issues

Have you Yo’ed yet today? No? Me either, my younger cousins haven’t Facebooked about it so I’m out of the loop. Anyway, it’s the messaging app that’s been all the rage for at least 48 hours or so, all because its sole function is to send your friends the word, “Yo.” Yes, that’s it. In any case, just as quickly as its star has shot to the heavens, people are already claiming to have hacked it right back down again.

TechCrunch reports that some Georgia Tech students have claimed to have hacked Yo, figuring out how to lift any user’s phone number from the app, among other things.

“We can get any Yo user’s phone number (I actually texted the founder, and he called me back). We can spoof Yo’s from any users, and we can spam any user with as many Yo,” the students said in an email to TechCrunch. “We could also send any Yo user a push notification with any text we want (though we decided not to do that).”

Then there’s a Vine video from someone who’s tricked out the Yo app to Rickroll the user, hacking it to bleat Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” instead of the usual “Yo” sound.

Yo’s founder Or Arbel confirmed that the app is “having security issues.”

“Some of the stuff has been fixed and some we are still working on. We are taking this very seriously,” he said, without detailing which hacks are still live, but that a specialist security team is on the case and that he hoped security issues would be fixed “in next few hours.”

Yo, guys? Now might be a good time to delete the app if you’re worried about hackers calling you or lifting any other information. Just saying. Better safe than sorry, as that man who lived under my bed used to say. And he was right… about everything.

Yo App Hacked By College Students [TechCrunch]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist