Critical Vulnerabilities Force Twitter Alternative Hive Social Offline

Social media platform Hive Social has taken its servers offline after security researchers identified and reported critical vulnerabilities in its code.

Founded in 2019, Hive Social is seen by many as an alternative to Twitter, which is having its own troubles now, with the resignation of a top security chief and new information emerging on a recent data breach.

With numerous concerned users fleeing Twitter following its acquisition by Elon Musk, Hive Social has registered a spike in new accounts, and announced in November 2022 that it has surpassed 1.5 million accounts.

On November 30, German security collective Zerforschung published a blog post to warn of many security vulnerabilities identified in Hive Social’s code.

“We found a number of critical vulnerabilities, which we confidentially reported to the company,” Zerforschung notes.

The security researchers say that, after acknowledging their report, the social platform only patched one vulnerability before taking their servers offline.

“After multiple days and multiple reminders by us, they claimed to fix them within the next two days. However after those two days, multiple vulnerabilities we reported were not fixed and still existed at the time of writing,” Zerforschung says.

According to the security researchers, an attacker could exploit the identified vulnerabilities to access all data on the social platform, including users’ private posts and messages, shared content, deleted direct messages, and private email addresses and phone numbers.

Furthermore, the security defects could allow attackers to overwrite user posts, the researchers say.

Zerforschung, which underlines the fact that Hive Social went offline one day after the existence of vulnerabilities in its code became public knowledge, says that the social platform’s developers have confirmed that they are working on addressing all issues.

“The Hive team has become aware of security issues that affect the stability of our application and the safety of our users. Fixing these issues will require temporarily turning off our servers for a couple of days while we fix this for a better and safer experience,” Hive Social tweeted.

SecurityWeek has emailed Hive Social for a comment on the matter and will update this post as soon as a reply arrives.

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