Teen-Phone Monitoring App Leaks Info About Teens and Parents

The app called Teen Safe is used by worried parents to keep tabs on their kids. The app gives parents access to their kids' location, text messages, call history, web browsing history and app downloads. But a big flaw means it's possible for hackers to keep tabs on the kids and their parents.

The company's servers, located on Amazon's cloud, were left unprotected and were accessible by anyone without a password, ZDNet reported Sunday.

So what information was exposed? Tens of thousands of parents' email addresses as well as the teens' Apple ID email addresses and their passwords. The names of the teenagers' devices—often just the teenagers' names—were also exposed on the server.

To add insult to injury, to use the app, users were required to turn off two-factor authentication, making it easier for hackers to take the data from the exposed server and do a lot more with it than they could otherwise.

After being alerted to the vulnerability by ZDNet, the company pulled its servers offline.

"We have taken action to close one of our servers to the public and begun alerting customers that could potentially be impacted," a TeenSafe spokesperson said to ZDNet.