WhiteHat Jr, an online coding platform for kids, reportedly exposed personal data of over 2.8 lakh students, teachers; most of them are minors. The exposure of data is due to some multiple vulnerabilities of their servers that existed till mid-November.
The company said that it fixed the issues after they were informed by a security researcher. However, it is unsure that the affected data is compromised until the issues were fixed. Earlier this quarter, WhiteHat Jr had another security flaw that exposed student information and transaction details.
According to the quint report, The anonymous security researcher made multiple disclosures between October 6 to November 20. And he finds that the AWS servers are now restricted by the company as of November 21.
“WhiteHat Jr takes security and privacy issues very seriously.” said a company spokesperson to The Quint.
“The fixes were applied immediately on identification and detection of the vulnerabilities in our applications and servers.”
– Company’s official response.
Last month, Santosh Patidar, founder of DINGG, took LinkedIn to highlight that he has no direct access to their platform in any way but he can still able to see the personal details of the kids along with their transaction details. He asked Byju’s owned WhiteHat Jr’s team to check with the issue. Later, he updated that the team has fixed the issues. Also, mentioned that one of their API was exposing too much data; and until the day before he addressed the issue, it allowed access to other users’ data through Auth token.
WhiteHat Jr filed a defamation lawsuit against a Critic
Apart from the security flaws, WhiteHat Jr faced a lot of criticism for their advertisements featuring young kids; targeting typical Indian parents. Also, the company recently filed a defamation lawsuit against Pradeep Poonia, one of its critics; who allegedly said that the company was not providing quality education to its students. It’s a 20 crore lawsuit, no further information on the progress. The company filed a second defamation case against angel investor Annirudh Malpani on November 23.
WhiteHat Jr, founded 2 years ago, acquired by Byju’s earlier this year for $300 million. The pandemic situation helped both the companies to grow their businesses; as the parents out there tend to enroll their children in online classes.
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