Thousands of Mobile Apps Expose Their Unprotected Firebase Hosted Databases

Mobile security researchers have discovered unprotected Firebase databases of thousands of iOS and Android mobile applications that are exposing over 100 million data records, including plain text passwords, user IDs, location, and in some cases, financial records such as banking and cryptocurrency transactions.

Google’s Firebase service is one of the most popular back-end development platforms for mobile and web applications that offers developers a cloud-based database, which stores data in JSON format and synced it in the real-time with all connected clients.

Researchers from mobile security firm Appthority discovered that many app developers' fail to properly secure their back-end Firebase endpoints with firewalls and authentication, leaving hundreds of gigabytes of sensitive data of their customers publicly accessible to anyone.

Why Hackers Aren’t Afraid of Us

Ask finance ministers and central bankers around the world about their worst nightmare and the answer is almost always the same: Sometime soon the North Koreans or the Russians will improve on the two huge cyberattacks they pulled off last year. One temporarily crippled the British health care system and the other devastated Ukraine before rippling across the world, disrupting shipping and shutting factories — a billion-dollar cyberattack the White House called “the most destructive and costly in history.”

The fact that no intelligence agency saw either attack coming — and that countries were so fumbling in their responses — led a group of finance ministers to simulate a similar attack that shut down financial markets and froze global transactions. By several accounts, it quickly spun into farce: No one wanted to admit how much damage could be done or how helpless they would be to deter it.

Frontier Communications' password bug lets anyone into your account

Is it our impression that our passwords are secured wrong?

Top 5 Recent Cyber-attacks/hacks and How They Could Relate to your Business.

Cyber-attacks can happen to any business and its not just large corporations that can suffer from data breaches. Small organizations are at an increased risk with limited resources as cyber attack can lead to data losses easily. However, the largest of corporations in the world have fallen prey to cyber attacks. Here are five of the recent cases.