Public domain image- Researchers reveal several vulnerabilities in Google-owned navigation app Waze
- Hackers are able to track users’ exact locations using “ghost drivers“
- Google issued a security update to address the issue
Are you a Waze user? You better update your app to the latest version.
A research conducted by the University of California-Santa Barbara has revealed several vulnerabilities in the Google-owned navigation map Waze; saying that the application can be used in tracking point-to-point movements of users in real time.
In an article written by Kashmir Hill for Fusion on April 27, 2016, it was disclosed that hackers are able to stage controlled attacks using the application, wherein thousands of “ghost drivers” communicate seamlessly with the mobile phones of regular users and send their location information to external servers.
“It’s such a massive privacy problem,” said computer science professor Ben Zhao; the leader of the research team.
According to the study, an experiment was held to monitor the movements of a person over a three-day period, wherein the researchers were able to track the exact locations of the subject in her trips to and from San Francisco and Las Vegas; including her commutes aboard a taxi and a bus.
“Users could be tracked right now and never know it,” Zhao said.
In 2013, Google bought Waze from an Israeli start-up company for $ 1.1 billion to address competition issues with Google’s homegrown navigation app, Google Maps.
Last January, Google acknowledged Waze’s vulnerabilities and issued an update dubbed as an “energy-saving feature” which prevented the app from broadcasting users’ locations while running in the background.
“Waze constantly improves its mechanisms and tools to prevent abuse and misuse. To that end, Waze is regularly in contact with the security and privacy research community — we appreciate their help protecting our users. This group of researchers connected with us in 2014, and we have already addressed some of their claims, implementing safeguards in our system to protect the privacy of our users,” Waze officials said in a statement.
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