Hackers Can Track Your Whereabouts with Waze Vulnerability

As if you didn’t have enough to worry about when it comes to being stalked on the Internet, now comes along a new hack to the social driving app Waze.
Researchers at the UC-Santa Barbara were able to demonstrate how to track an individual’s whereabouts by creating hundreds of different “ghost” drivers inside of the application.

As demonstrated to a reporter from Fusion, the team could then track her whereabouts using how Waze shows the location of other drivers and their username.

Fortunately, the trick only works if the user is running Waze in the foreground. If the app’s running in the background it can’t be traced.

The flaw isn’t new, as it was first discovered last summer. Waze is aware of the exploit, according to the report, so the Google-owned company is presumably working away on a fix.

Why this matters: It seems like each day there’s something new to worry about when it comes to the world of online security. This latest issue with Waze is indeed creepy, and given the resources of Google we have to imagine that there would be some type of fix soon. It would take someone with considerable hacking prowess to pull this off, but if the issue is that concerning to you then you’d want to run the app in the background as much as possible or just go with another navigation solution.