Hive Social is a microblogging service developed by the Brazilian company Hive Social Inc.

The microblogging service shut down its service unexpectedly on Wednesday, 30th November after a security advisory firm warned the platform has serious vulnerabilities that exposed all data stored in user accounts.

"Warning: Do not use Hive Social ⚠️🐝

We found multiple critical security vulnerabilities in the App, leaking private messages, posts, images and user data like phone numbers, emails and birthdates.", security advisor Zerforschung said in a tweet on Dec 1st.

The company on December 1, 2022, at 6:27 AM IST tweeted that they are aware of the vulnerability issues and they are shutting down their servers temporarily for a few days to fix the issues.

"Hi everyone!🐝 The Hive team has become aware of security issues that affect the stability of our application and the safety of our users. Fixing these issues will require temporarily turning off our servers for a couple of days while we fix this for a better and safer experience" Hive said from their official Twitter handle.

"The issues we reported allow any attacker to access all data, including private posts, private messages, shared media and even deleted direct messages. This also includes private email addresses and phone numbers entered during login.", Zerforschung a berlin based security advisor wrote in a post titled "⚠️ Warning: do not use Hive Social 👉🐝👈"

"Attackers can also overwrite data such as posts owned by other users" the post added

"After multiple attempts to contact the company we finally reached them by phone and they acknowledged the report," the post said.

"After multiple days and multiple reminders by us, they claimed to fix them within the next two days. However, after those two days, multiple vulnerabilities we reported were not fixed and still existed at the time of writing" previously the article on Zerforschung's website stated.

After the acquisition of the microblogging platform Twitter by Elon Musk for 44 billion dollars, several Twitter users started finding alternatives to the microblogging platform.

Hive is one of Twitter's alternatives among many others like Mastodon, CounterSocial, Gab etc.

Hive has seen a massive increase in its users since the world's richest man took over Twitter. The platform's user base has increased by over a million from 1 million to 2 million last week, Business Insider reported.

The data of over 2 million users were at risk if the security advisor Zerforschung didn't check and reported the vulnerabilities. The lesson here should be taken then do not trust these emerging social networking platforms as we trust Google or Twitter. The big social media platforms including Youtube, Twitter etc., spend millions to protect users' data from attackers still attackers find a way to get into their systems and steal the data. Recently the data of 500 million Whatsapp users' was found on sale online.

Originally Published at: mayankvikash.in