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Look Out, Yo! Messaging App Hacked

Three Georgia Tech students hacked into popular messaging app Yo the same week it hit $1 million in investor funding.

Look Out, Yo! Messaging App Hacked
Newsy Staff
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Heads up, Yo. Hackers have infiltrated the popular messaging app as of Friday and gained access to millions of users Yo accounts.

Three Georgia Institute of Technology students taking credit for the hack told TechCrunch in an e-mail: "We can get any Yo user's phone number ... and we can spam any user with as many Yos as we want. We could also send any Yo user a push notification with any text we want (though we decided not to do that.)"

Yo founder Or Arbel confirmed the hack. He told Mashable he spoke with the hackers and that they actually helped him to resolve the issue. 

Arbel told TechCrunch he is taking the vulnerability very seriously and has brought in a security team to help patch it up. 

Yo serves one, insanely simple purpose. It allows users to send each other notifications with an audible and text, "Yo." Nothing else, just, "Yo."

Known as Life Before Us, the Silicon Valley company behind Yo made headlines earlier this week after it was revealed that Arbel had already raised $1 million from investors just three months after creating the app.

A writer for Entrepreneur points out the story of Yo's lightning-fast rise and subsequent hacking issues is like a satire of Silicon Valley. "If a comedian were going to make fun of the Web 2.0 boom, this is exactly the story they would tell."

"This was something that was really hacked together in the first place. The app as it is. This is something that was built in eight hours. The founder, Or, has said that very, very clearly." (Via Fox Business)

As of Friday afternoon, Yo is the number one free social networking app in Apple's App store. So get it together, Yo.