The application for visitors to the Beijing Olympics contains serious security flaws

The risk of coronavirus infection is clearly not the only thing visitors to this year’s Beijing Olympics should be concerned about. According to the Brinkwire portal, the application that participants must download is full of security issues.

The application proposed by the organizing committee in Beijing, which you will find in the store under the name MY2022, looks harmless at first glance. In addition to an overview of Olympic events, it provides, for example, recommendations for tourist attractions, information related to the coronavirus pandemic or GPS navigation.

The application is a nightmare of security experts

However, researchers from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto have found that the application is so insecure that it can violate Chinese privacy laws. Collects a amount of data about the user, which he sends to the owner’s servers without any encryption. It also often fails to authenticate SSL certificates, which means that it does not check where the data is actually sent before sending it. This gives cyber attackers the ability to impersonate the official servers for which the data is collected.

The researchers tested version 2.0.1 for the Android operating system and version 2.0.0 for the iOS. In both cases, there were similar security issues. The report further said that due to shortcomings, the application may violate Google’s policies to protect users from malicious applications, as well as Apple’s developer policies.