Dating Apps Could be the Achilles Heel for Bring Your Own Device

Today it’s hard to find someone, especially in their 20’s or 30’s, who doesn’t have a dating app on their phone. Whether it’s OKCupid, Tinder or Plenty of Fish people are looking to make connections through their devices. But what happens when those devices are not entirely their own?

IBM has conducted a study where they exploited vulnerabilities on 26 out of the 41 dating apps on Android’s Google Platform. Just because they only researched Android does not meant that these security risks don’t exists in other operating systems as well. In addition, they also reported that 50 percent of the BYOD devices in the companies surveyed have dating apps installed on them.

These “medium to high” security risks could potentially activate the end-user’s microphone and leak GPS data which would risk private and corporate security. It is reported that IBM did not release the names of the apps, but did notify their developers so they could fix the issues if they choose to.

According to an article written by Martin Anderson for The Stack, the vulnerability of dating apps on Android reared its head in September of 2014 when researchers from the University of New Haven identified security weaknesses in social apps including Tinder, Grindr, OKCupid, Instagram and Oovoo.

Most of the risk comes from “phishing”-style messages, or spam messages that will ask for sensitive information or allow the installation of malware.

One of the biggest drawbacks of BYOD has always been security and the vulnerability of users downloading corrupted apps that could compromise corporate data. It’s well within the user’s rights to download personal apps, but at the same time the corporation has the right to tell them what apps they can’t be downloading because of security issues.