What seems to be a shocking revelation from hacker group Anonymous India, Jio Chat, the instant messaging mobile app from Reliance Jio telecom operator seems to be allegedly sending users private data to a Chinese server. It’s still not clear what type of user data is being shared with the Chinese server and what they are doing with the data.
The hacker group through a series of tweets from its Twitter handle @AnonOpsIndia claims to find evidence that the messaging app was sending users sensitive data to a Chinese IP. They decompiled the Jio Chat android application APK file and found references to a Chinese IP address which was receiving Indian user data.
Another twitter user @digimaverick also shared screenshots of the code from the decompiled Reliance Jio chat app, which clearly shows the Chinese IP and Chinese language strings. In addition the hacker also provides evidence of location and other sensitive data of Indian users being sent from the app to the Chinese servers.
Another disturbing revelation is that, all this data that been passed to the Chinese servers are not encrypted, so anyone with a hacking skill can easily gain access to this sensitive data of Jio Chat users.
Reliance Jio Chat was launched on April 2015, as a home-grown instant messaging and calling app that offers instant messaging, group chats, stickers, free SMS, voice & video calling, conference calling and even brands & Celebrities Channels to engage.
However with the latest security exposure, the privacy of all Reliance Jio chat users is being severely compromised. At the time of writing this article, Reliance hasn’t commented on the issue. We will update this article once we receive more details on it.