Oh noes yous gays, Grindr has been hacked! Who would have thought that a casual hookup app might not be completely secure? "We are certainly aware of a lot of these vulnerabilities and ... they will be fixed as fast as humanly possible," the popular app's founder, Joel Simkhai, admitted.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, a hacker down under has been accessing user's accounts, changing user's pictures, chatting and sending out photos. Also, at one point there was apparently a website (now down) which allowed folks "to search for any Grindr user regardless of their location, and capitalised on the vulnerabilities to offer other services not designed by the apps."
It appears that mostly Australian users were targeted in the hacks (of the more than one million Grindr users 100,000 live in Australia) but the app's vulnerabilities, which stemmed from very basic security precautions, existed worldwide. They also seem to be a problem for the company's far-less-fun straight-people friend app Blendr (Update: Grindr tells us that Belndr was not affected by the hack).
On the plus side for those worried about where their shirtless (or worse) photos might now be living... Grindr assures its users that their chats, where the really dirty pictures live since profile pics must be PG, are safe: "Not only can chat not be monitored, but since we don't store chat history on our servers there is no way anyone can access all past chat history."
Still freaked out about what might happen the next time Grindr loses its keys? Well, here's how to get them to permanently delete your account.
