Brand new social media platform Hive Social was taken offline last week due to security issues that may have exposed its users’ data. This temporary shutdown came shortly after the platform gained over 1 million users in just a couple of weeks, many of whom came from Twitter.
Hive is a woman-led social media platform developed by a handful of people with the goal of “bringing back what you used to love about social media in a new way. Profile music, text and image posts, polls, Q&A, and so much more!”
The stated purpose of the social media platform is to combat algorithm-based platforms that pepper users with targeted content, including ads and promotions. According to its privacy policy, Hive does not process any of its users’ sensitive information.
Following Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, many users have decided to seek alternatives to the popular microblogging platform. Over the past few weeks, over 1 million people reportedly decided to use Hive instead.
However, over the past few days, users haven’t been able to use any of the new platform’s features. According to researchers at zerforschung.org, the reasoning for this is a security issue that could have allowed threat actors to access all user data, “including private posts, private messages, shared media and even deleted direct messages [as well as] private email addresses and phone numbers entered during login.” Additionally, hackers would have the ability to overwrite data, including posts owned by other users.
Hive broke the news on Twitter last week, saying, “The Hive team has become aware of security issues that affect the stability of our application and the safety of our users. Fixing these issues will require temporarily turning off our servers for a couple of days while we fix this for a better and safer experience.”
According to reports, the researchers found the issues to be so serious that they refused to disclose any technical details out of fear that the hackers would exploit them.
That said, Hive maintained last week that none of their accounts have been compromised.