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Is Shein’s app putting your phone at risk? Shocking new discovery revealed

Popular fashion platform spied on users without their consent

Is Shein’s app putting your phone at risk? Shocking new discovery revealed
Abelardo González

Abelardo González

  • March 9, 2023
  • Updated: September 27, 2024 at 12:46 PM

One of the greatest conveniences offered by the Internet is the possibility of buying anything without leaving your living room. For this reason, in recent years options such as AliExpress, eBay or Amazon have not stopped growing and gaining followers, a select group joined by the Shein platform after conquering more than 100 million users on Android devices. However, an investigation has revealed that the well-known fashion app had a malicious error that gave access to personal data and, until it was corrected, it was active for half a year.

Shein APK DOWNLOAD

This information comes from The Hacker News, an Anglo-Saxon portal specialized in system vulnerabilities. In a recent news item, they report that a Shein bug made it possible to periodically capture and send the contents of the clipboard to a remote server. For those who are not familiar with the clipboard function, this is the tool that manages the content that the user has copied. Thus, those who have chosen to copy a password, personal data or an excerpt of a conversation, put their information at risk without knowing it. But luckily for Shein users and shoppers, this bug was fixed almost a year ago.

As they point out in the news, this problem was related to version 7.9.2 of the Shein app on Android, a revision that saw the light of day last December 16, 2021. Since then, all users saw their private information exposed, a situation that came to an end when the bug was fixed in May 2022. Today, almost a year later, Shein has version 9.0.0, an update free of such errors. And, as a direct consequence, both those in charge of the application and those responsible for Google introduced various changes to prevent this situation from recurring.

Google Chrome DOWNLOAD

As reported by members of Shein itself, one of the star apps for gifting at any time of the year, no member had specific knowledge of malicious intent behind such behavior. Google, for its part, introduced a series of measures to prevent apps from accessing the clipboard. These include a warning when an app intends to do so and a ban on apps attempting to obtain data while not running in the foreground. In this way, Google made sure to protect clipboards, a tool they consider key as it allows attackers to collect useful information and data from their targets.

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