Bugs in transportation app Moovit gave hackers free rides | TechCrunch

Hackers might have hijacked the person accounts of a well-liked transportation app and used them to get free rides and entry folks’s private data, in keeping with a safety researcher.

Omer Attias, a safety researcher at SafeBreach, mentioned he discovered three vulnerabilities within the Moovit app, which allowed him to gather new Moovit person’s registration data from all around the world — together with mobile phone numbers, e mail addresses, residence addresses, and the final 4 digits of bank cards. Worst of all, the bugs might have allowed him to take over different folks’s accounts, and consequently their bank cards, to pay for his personal rides.

This complete chain of exploits might have been carried out with out the goal ever discovering out, other than seeing undesirable expenses on their bank card. Attias referred to as it “the proper assault.”

“We will totally impersonate accounts, with out disconnecting them. It’s loopy, we even have the power to carry out all of the operations on behalf of various accounts, together with ordering prepare tickets,” Attias instructed TechCrunch in an interview forward of his discuss on the Def Con hacking conference in Las Vegas. “And moreover, we will entry all of their private data.”

To exhibit the affect of the bugs he discovered, Attias created a customized interface that allowed him to take over different folks’s accounts with a few faucets. And whereas Attias mentioned he examined his exploits solely in Israel, he mentioned he thinks it might have labored in different cities on condition that Moovit operates all around the world.

Moovit is an Israeli startup that was acquired by Intel in 2020 for $900 million. The app permits customers to search out routes and examine public transportation methods’ maps, in addition to to buy and use tickets. The app and its underlying expertise are broadly used worldwide: Moovit claims to serve 1.7 billion riders in 3,500 cities throughout 112 international locations.

Whereas the affect of those vulnerabilities was doubtlessly large, Moovit mentioned there is no such thing as a proof that malicious hackers discovered and exploited these bugs. Attias mentioned that he reported all of the bugs he discovered to the corporate in September 2022, and the corporate subsequently mounted them.

“Moovit was conscious of and rectifying the difficulty when it was reported, and took speedy steps to complete correcting the difficulty,” Moovit spokesperson Sharon Kaslassi instructed TechCrunch. “The vulnerabilities have lengthy since been mounted and no buyer motion is required. It’s necessary to notice that no unhealthy actors took benefit of those points to entry buyer information. Moreover, no bank card data was uncovered as Moovit and Moovit-Pango don’t maintain bank card data on file.”

Kaslassi additionally mentioned that “ticketing service related to those findings is lively in Israel solely.”

“In line with our data, neither Safebreach or anybody else took benefit of any buyer information in or exterior of Israel,” the spokesperson added.

In response to Moovit’s feedback, Attias mentioned that he and his colleagues “consider we might have charged any buyer not restricted to Israeli prospects. We haven’t seen any differentiator between Israeli and non Israeli prospects of their API requests.”

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