Looks Like That Ridiculous ‘Yo’ App Has Already Been Hacked

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Published

June 21, 2014

This week saw a flurry of interest around a new time-wasting app called Yo. If you haven’t already installed it, you’ve probably received messages from half your contact list telling you to do so. The idea behind Yo is ridiculously simple – you download it, add friends, and then send vaguely passive-aggressive messages that just say “Yo” back and forth to each-other.

Yo is basically The Social Network on speed. It was created in just eight hours, by a guy who wanted a simple way to “summon” his assistant, and in recent days, has rocketed to the top of the iTunes store and raised upwards of a million dollars in investments. And now, the damn thing has been hacked.

The Atlantic Wire report that a pair of Georgia Tech students kids broke through Yo’s comically lax security overnight, and have started fucking with its users, essentially to prove a point. They didn’t do much beyond sending a bunch of erroneous “Yo”s to users, but they explained how they could have gone further.

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

So basically, if you’ve installed Yo, a pair of nerds have your phone number, and may have been sending you unwanted push notifications. The easiest thing to do may be to uninstall Yo and continue living your life.

via Atlantic Wire