Sports federations and competition organizations generally have applications available for fans so they can follow results and receive news. Cybercriminals see this as an opportunity to attack millions of users around the globe. This is what happened last weekend with the official Formula One application.
On Saturday afternoon, those users who had the application installed on their mobile devices began to receive notifications that were not, precisamente, competition results. The most notorious of them was as follows:
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| “I should check my security… :)” |
The organization quickly responded by informing that, indeed, the notification delivery service had been compromised. Immediately they took action and suspended that service, in addition to starting tasks to secure it.
The statement continues confirming that this attack has only targeted the notification service and that, for the time being, the application users' data has not been compromised. Investigations continue and work is being done to improve security.
Unfortunately, this is not the first attack suffered in the Big Circus that is Formula One. Last February, the Williams team had to suspend the virtual event for the presentation of this season's racing car. La escudería hizo una aplicación móvil que iba a permitir visualizar mediante realidad aumentada el nuevo vehículo y se filtraron los modelos y las imágenes del coche unos días antes del evento. No quedó más remedio que retirar de las tiendas de iOS y Android la aplicación en cuestión.
Este tipo de sucesos nos recuerda, once again, que cualquier aplicación es susceptible de sufrir vulnerabilidades que pueden permitir la filtración de datos. A nosotros, los usuarios, nos queda confiar que los orígenes de las aplicaciones que instalamos sean legítimos.
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