{"id":4932,"date":"2018-02-08T09:49:59","date_gmt":"2018-02-08T08:49:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/159.69.82.204\/win\/?p=4932"},"modified":"2018-02-08T09:49:59","modified_gmt":"2018-02-08T08:49:59","slug":"does-hotspot-shield-leaks-user-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/borncity.com\/win\/2018\/02\/08\/does-hotspot-shield-leaks-user-data\/","title":{"rendered":"Does Hotspot Shield leaks user data?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"float: left; margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px; display: inline\" src=\"http:\/\/www.borncity.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/Stop.jpg\" align=\"left\">[<a href=\"https:\/\/www.borncity.com\/blog\/2018\/02\/08\/hotspot-shield-petzt-nutzerdaten\/\" target=\"_blank\">German<\/a>]A security expert has discovered that the VPN service Hotspot Shield, which is supposed to guarantee privacy, leaks sensitive information about the user. <\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>AnchorFree is one of the largest VPN providers in the USA and the company behind the HotSpot Shield VPN service. The company advertises its service as: <\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Get Internet privacy, security, security, blocked access to websites and more through the download hotspot Shield VPN today.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>In Google Play Store there is the App <a href=\"https:\/\/play.google.com\/store\/apps\/details?id=hotspotshield.android.vpn&amp;hl=en\" target=\"_blank\">Hotspot Shield Free VPN Proxy WiFi Security<\/a>. There are 500 million users of this VPN service. <\/p>\n<h2>A information disclosure vulnerability<\/h2>\n<p>Security researcher Paulos Yibelo has now discovered an information disclosure vulnerability Hotspot Shield. According to <a href=\"https:\/\/cve.mitre.org\/cgi-bin\/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2018-6460\" target=\"_blank\">CVE-2018-6460<\/a>, Hotspot Shield runs a webserver with a static IP address 127.0.0.1 and port 895. The web server uses JSONP and hosts sensitive information including configuration. User controlled input is not sufficiently filtered: an unauthenticated attacker can send a POST request to <em>\/status.js<\/em> with the parameter <em>func=$_APPLOG.Rfunc<\/em> and extract sensitive information about the machine, including whether the user is connected to a VPN, to which VPN he\/she is connected, and what is their real IP address. <\/p>\n<p>Paulos Yibelo has published his findings <a href=\"http:\/\/www.paulosyibelo.com\/2018\/02\/hotspot-shield-cve-2018-6460-sensitive.html\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>. At ZDNet. com, Zack Withacker, disussed the topic within <a href=\"http:\/\/www.zdnet.com\/article\/privacy-flaw-in-hotspot-shield-can-identify-users-locations\/\" target=\"_blank\">this article<\/a>. Withacker posted a screenshot, where no IP address of the user system can be found in the communication. But data like the network name is transferred. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[German]A security expert has discovered that the VPN service Hotspot Shield, which is supposed to guarantee privacy, leaks sensitive information about the user.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[580],"tags":[261,1019],"class_list":["post-4932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-security","tag-privacy","tag-vpn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/borncity.com\/win\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/borncity.com\/win\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/borncity.com\/win\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/borncity.com\/win\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/borncity.com\/win\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4932"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/borncity.com\/win\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4932\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/borncity.com\/win\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/borncity.com\/win\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/borncity.com\/win\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}