Is Yappy hacked? Social network denies data leak of 2 million users

Hackers broke into the social network Yappy and stole the data of 2 million users, Kommersant reported, and specialized Telegram channels confirm it. However, the social network itself denies this information.

According to the Data1eaks channel, the database, which was stolen using the account of one of the service administrators, contains 2,160,348 phone numbers. The database is about 1 GB and also contains tables with other data, such as user name, date of birth, smartphone model and firmware version, password hash, user ID and data about linked accounts. According to the channel, the database had fresh data as of July 1, 2022.

Yappy itself, as well as Gazprom-Media, which owns this social network, have not confirmed information about the leak. According to the publication RIA Novosti, representatives of the social network noted that "irrelevant dumps of anonymized user data, containing nicknames and phone numbers," are publicly available.

The representatives of the social network also noted that the application does not collect such data as names of users, dates of birth and so on, so the leak could not lead to the risk of their uncontrolled proliferation.

The laws of the Russian Federation require that an organization that encounters a data leak report it to Russian media and information watchdog (Roskomnadzor) within 24 hours. If information about the leak appears in the media or is discovered by Roskomnadzor employees before the company itself is notified, it may be regarded as a fact of concealment of the incident.

The social network Yappy was launched on November 29, 2021 by Ritm Media, which is part of Gazprom-Media. Yappy is considered the Russian analogue of TikTok where you can post and watch short vertical videos. Today the Yappy app is available for download on iOS and Android platforms, and the social network's audience already exceeds 4 million users.