The Yo app might seem silly and novel on the surface, but for some strange reason it has managed to catch on in a very fast and viral way. Perhaps it’s the simplistic nature of the app which stands out from the sea of feature-rich apps like WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat, and etc. In any case you might recall that the app was hacked last week and now according to a post by Yo’s founder, Or Arbel, he thinks that it was lucky that they were hacked.
Posting on Medium, Arbel wrote that being hacked was something he considered lucky, especially since the hack took place at the app’s early stages, as opposed to later where the breach could have had more disastrous results.
For example he states that as it stands, Yo only requires you to choose a username, as opposed to having you login with your Facebook account or enter your email, full name, or passwords, so as far as data breaches are concerned, it’s not as bad as when PSN or Target was hacked and credit card information was released.
Arbel also wrote that the issue has since been resolved, hopefully. The app reportedly took 8 hours to build and managed to rack up 1 million users so far. Perhaps the creators did not anticipate such high demand, otherwise more time would have been spent looking for bugs and closing off any potential exploits, but hopefully Yo has managed to take something away from all of this and avoid similar situations in the future.