WeChat isn’t the only app to have troubles in the last few days as Tango can also be thrown in the mix. Where WeChat‘s issue was a major outage, however, Tango‘s problem was much more serious: the website was hacked. Worse still, 1.5TB of user information may have been compromised in the attack according to early reports.
Records of local users had been seized by the hackers
The attack was apparently conducted by the Syrian Electronic Army. Syrian state television also announced the Tango hacking, indicating records of local users had been seized by the hackers, according to the Associated Press.
The group made the following posting to its website on Friday:
The Syrian Electronic Army hacked the Tango app (video/text messages service) website and database
The databases content a of millions of the app users phone numbers and contacts and their emails
More than 1.5 TB of the daily-backups of the servers network has been downloaded successfully
Much of the information in the databases that were downloaded will be delivered to the Syrian government
In addition, the group also made the following posting on Twitter:
Tango confirmed the breach in their official Twitter account: “Tango experienced a cyber intrusion that resulted in unauthorized access to some data. We are working on increasing our security systems.”
It was denied, however, that any sensitive information or social media passwords for Tango users were obtained by the hackers: “It is false information that attackers were able to access our users’ Facebook, Twitter, or any other social media passwords.” Still, it’s always a good idea to change your passwords periodically regardless of whether information was stolen or not. We’ll post any further information as it is obtained.