Winter Olympics 2022 that are scheduled to be held in Beijing from next month i.e. in between February 4th to February 22nd, 2022 is in news for wrong reasons. The MY2022 app that needs to be installed by all the participants attending the event is reported to be filled with several security vulnerabilities, allowing hackers to intercept the data loaded and stored on the app any time.
According to a report released by Citizen Lab, the MY2022 App has encryption issues exposing sensitive data to hackers.
Mobile Security researchers at the Citizen Lab have discovered that the information could be read by telecom service providers and any spying agent via public Wi-Fi hotspots installed in airports, Olympic venues, transit stations and hotels.
So, all the foreign athletes and admin staff using the app could easily fall into the risk of spilling their sensitive data to cyber criminals or the Chinese authorities.
When the issue was brought to the notice of the US Olympic & and Paralympics Committee, they remained silent on the issue.
However, a source based on the condition of anonymity reported that the encryption feature was removed by the officials managing the winter multi sport event to keep a track of every communication, transaction and web activity taking place on the app- hinting the sports persons to expect least from app regarding security and privacy.
FYI, MY2022 Olympics app cannot be loaded onto the latest series of Apple iPhone and Google Pixel devices. And the old versions are observed to be experiencing conflicts between the application and operating system/s.
