- Researchers found a way to extract email addresses from Lovense user accounts
- A mitigation was released, but allegedly it’s not working as intended
- The company claims it still needs months before plugging the leak
Lovense, a sex tech company specializing in smart, remotely controlled adult toys, had a vulnerability in its systems which could allow threat actors to view people’s private email addresses.
All they needed was that person’s username and apparently – these things are relatively easy to come by.
Recently, security researchers under the alias BobDaHacker, Eva, Rebane, discovered that if they knew someone’s username (maybe they saw it on a forum or during a cam show), they could log into their own Lovense account (which doesn’t need to be anything special, a regular user account will suffice), and use a script to turn the username into a fake email (this step uses encryption and parts of Lovense’s system meant for internal use).
That fake email gets added as a “friend” in the chat system, but when the system updates the contact list, it accidentally reveals the real email address behind the username in the background code.
Automating exfiltration
The entire process can be automated and done in less than a second, which means threat actors could have abused it to grab thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of email addresses, quickly and efficiently.
The company has roughly 20 million customers worldwide, so the attack surface is rather large.
The bug was discovered together with another, even more dangerous flaw, which allowed for account takeover. While that one was quickly remedied by the company, this one has not yet been fixed. Apparently, the company still needs “months” of work to plug the leak:
“We’ve launched a long-term remediation plan that will take approximately ten months, with at least four more months required to fully implement a complete solution,” Lovense told the researcher.
“We also evaluated a faster, one-month fix. However, it would require forcing all users to upgrade immediately, which would disrupt support for legacy versions. We’ve decided against this approach in favor of a more stable and user-friendly solution.”
Lovense also said that it deployed a proxy feature as a mitigation but apparently, it’s not working as intended.
How to stay safe
The attack is particularly concerning as such records could contain more than enough of sensitive information for hackers to launch highly personalized, successful phishing campaigns, leading to identity theft, wire fraud, and even ransomware attacks.
If you’re concerned you may have been caught up in the incident, don’t worry – there are a number of methods to find out. HaveIBeenPwned? is probably the best resource only to check if your details have been affected, offering a run-down of every big cyber incident of the past few years.
And if you save passwords to a Google account, you can use Google’s Password Checkup tool to see if any have been compromised, or sign up for one of the best password manager options we’ve rounded up to make sure your logins are protected.
Via BleepingComputer
