• The Tea app was hit with a data breach that exposed 72,000 images, including selfies and IDs.
• The app said the breach involved a legacy data system with information from over two years ago.
• Tea, which lets women share anonymous dating advice and reviews, hit the top spot in the App Store.

Tea, the anonymous dating advice app for women that has the internet buzzing, is in hot water after a data breach.

Thousands of images of women, including selfies and photos of IDs that were used to verify their identity to join the app, were exposed because of the breach.

"We can confirm that at 6:44 AM PST on Friday, July 25th, Tea identified unauthorized access to one of our systems and immediately launched a full investigation to assess the scope and impact," a spokesperson for Tea told Business Insider in a statement.

"Preliminary findings indicate that the incident involved a legacy data storage system containing information from over two years ago," the spokesperson said.

The Tea app allows women to post a "man" (including his name, estimated age, location, and photos) with the option to add commentary. Users can also react to posts with green or red flags. Some users post photos of men asking for "tea" — gossip — about them. Others share posts seeking advice. The app does not allow screenshots.

The breach included about 72,000 images — about 13,000 of which were either selfies or photo identification "submitted during account verification," the company said. Another 59,000 images from within the app, as well as comments and direct messages, "were accessed without authorization."

404 Media, which found that the data had been posted to 4chan, first reported the breach on Friday morning,

Tea said it is working with "third-party cybersecurity experts" after the breach and does not believe "current or additional user data was affected."

Meanwhile, in the Tea app, an administrative account "TaraTeaAdmin" informed users about the breach in a post, which now has hundreds of comments on it.

The Tea app has seen an influx of new users and hit No. 1 on the US Apple App Store this week. On Friday, the company posted an Instagram story stating that more than 2 million new users have requested to join the app.

Privacy concerns had already been a topic of discussion amid Tea's virality — but mostly concerning the privacy of the men posted to the app. Now, those concerns are going both ways.

My earliest memory of 4chan was sitting up late at night, typing its URL into my browser, and scrolling through a thread of LOLcat memes, which were brand-new at the time.

Back then a photoshop of a cat saying "I can has cheezburger" or an image of an owl saying “ORLY?” was, without question, the funniest thing my 14-year-old brain had ever laid eyes on. So much so, I woke my dad up by laughing too hard and had to tell him that I was scrolling through pictures of cats at 2 in the morning. Later, I would become intimately familiar with the site’s much more nefarious tendencies.

It's strange to look back at 4chan, apparently wiped off the Internet entirely last week by hackers from a rival message board, and think about how many different websites it was over its more than two decades online. What began as a hub for Internet culture and an anonymous way station for the Internet's anarchic true believers devolved over the years into a fan club for mass shooters, the central node of Gamergate, and the beating heart of far-right fascism around the world—a virus that infected every facet of our lives, from the slang we use to the politicians we vote for. But the site itself had been frozen in amber since the George W. Bush administration.

Read full article

Comments