Apologizing for the inappropriate messages, Bykea has now announced that the application is “fully functional and safe to use”
Somewhere between 12pm to 1pm today, Bykea users all over Pakistan, started receiving a number of different troll notifications, all of which contained curse words and insults targeted towards Pakistan and its nationals.
Different Bykea users received different notifications, with curse words towards Pakistan being the common element in all of them. After a while of sending curse words, the hackers even sent out a sarcastic or a rather ‘show-off’ message saying ‘app abhi tak hacked hai’, followed by a curse word directed to all users.
Here are a few notifications we have been able to collect:
While the application continued to give out insulting notifications, it was surprisingly functional the whole time, proving that the hack was not meant to disrupt Bykea’s services but was only an attack on its notification system.
Throughout this time, Bykea’s main website, which works similar to the application, showed no signs of hacking.
Bykea has now gained back the control of its application and the notifications have now stopped. The ride hailing company has also sent out a notice apologizing to all users, while also adding that the application is “fully functional and safe to use” now.
It was later confirmed through Bykea that the hackers had targetted Bykea’s marketing comms tools, which was used to send out notifications to users. A third party product, the marketing comms tool was easy to access and one of the best tools to send out an insulting message.
“We apologize for the inappropriate messaging sent through Bykea. We can confirm that this was a third party communication tool which got compromised. Our team has restored it and the Bykea app is fully functional and safe to use. If users are facing any issues, we are available on our helpline,” said Bykea in its statement.
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