Amazon Android app, ‘Ring,’ used for monitoring one’s properties from any place, was found with a high-severity flaw that hackers could abuse to steal saved camera recordings, potentially compromising people’s privacy.
With over 10 million downloads from users worldwide, the flaw in the Amazon Android app could have exposed people’s privacy to hackers, assuming that its developers have overlooked patching it. Fortunately, this flaw has already been addressed and fixed weeks after it was discovered last May 1.
The researchers studied and analysed the flaw found in the Amazon Android app.
Upon studying the discovered critical privacy flaw on the ‘Ring’ app, the researchers learned that it has been exposing an ‘activity’ that allows any other app installed on the user’s Android device to launch.
For clarification, an Android device’s ‘activity’ is a program component displaying an interactable screen for users to perform certain actions. This component becomes a loophole in an Android app since it is always possible to expose that activity to other apps installed on a device when an actor adds it to the other app’s manifest file.
This issue had existed in the case of the Amazon Android app in question, as researchers discovered that its ‘com.ringapp/com.ring.nh.deeplink.DeepLinkActivity’ activity was exposed in its manifest file that would have allowed any other Android app installed in the device to launch it easily.
The researchers added that only webpages on domains ring[.]com and a2z[.]com could interact with the exposed activity. Nonetheless, they did not cross out the possibility that a hacker could launch and direct it to a malicious C2 server where they could operate with it.
Included in the assessment is a drill for determining a working attack chain, where researchers verify the flaw’s probability of being exploited. The drill showed that threat actors could abuse the flaw and harvest sensitive information from victims, including their full names, email addresses, phone numbers, geolocation, and saved video recordings.
After sending Amazon a detailed bug report, the company immediately took action and deployed a fix. It is also worth noting that the flaw had not been used for an attack, and no data from users were compromised.
