"Throne fixes security bug that exposed creators’ private home addresses", 6 April 2023

A recently fixed security bug at a popular platform for supporting creators shows how even privacy-focused platforms can put creators’ private information at risk.

Throne, founded in 2021, bills itself as “a fully secure, concierge wishlist service that acts as an intermediary between your fans and you.” Throne claims to support more than 200,000 creators by shipping out thousands of their wish list items per day, all the while protecting the privacy of the creators’ home address.

The idea is that online creators, like streamers and gamers, can publish a wish list of gifts that supporters can buy, and Throne acts as the go-between. “Your fans pay for the gifts and we handle the rest,” its website reads. “We make sure that the payment gets processed, that the item gets sent, and most importantly, that your private information stays private.”

But a group of good-faith hackers found a vulnerability that undermined that claim and exposed the private home addresses of its creator users.

Enter Zerforschung, the German collective of security researchers behind its latest discovery.

Zerforschung told TechCrunch that they discovered the vulnerability in how the company set up its database, hosted on Google’s Firebase, to store data. The researchers said that the database was inadvertently configured to allow anyone on the internet to access the data inside, including session cookies for its Amazon accounts from the database, which can be used to break into an account without needing the password.

With those Amazon session cookies, the security researchers found they could access Throne’s Amazon account used for ordering and sending gifts from a creator’s wish list, without ever needing a password. The researchers said that anyone with the same session cookies, effectively the keys to Throne’s Amazon account, could log in and look back at thousands of orders and their creators’ names and addresses.

The collective of researchers reported the bug to Throne later the same day. Throne fixed the bug shortly after, and confirmed the security lapse in a blog post published this week, thanking Zerforschung for their findings.

But questions remain for the company. Throne says it used network logs to determine that “there was no risk and no unknown party had viewed any data.” Zerforschung disputes this claim, as Throne did not ask the collective for their IP addresses that the company could use to investigate the incident while ruling out the researchers’ activity.

Throne also claimed in its blog post that an unnamed German data privacy expert “confirmed that there was no data risk,” which doesn’t make sense since Zerforschung proved that to the contrary.

When reached for comment, Throne co-founder Patrice Becker reiterated much of Throne’s blog post in boilerplate remarks but declined to answer our specific questions or provide the name of the alleged data privacy expert from its blog post.

Becker did not dispute Zerforschung’s findings or the exposure of creators’ home addresses when asked about this.