Tea App That Claimed to Protect Women Exposes 72,000 IDs in Epic Security Fail

The viral women-only courting security app Tea suffered an enormous information breach this week after customers on 4chan found its backend database was utterly unsecured—no password, no encryption, nothing.

The outcome? Over 72,000 non-public photographs—together with selfies and authorities IDs submitted for person verification—have been scraped and unfold on-line inside hours. Some have been mapped and made searchable. Non-public DMs have been leaked. The app designed to guard ladies from harmful males had simply uncovered its total person base.

The uncovered information, totaling 59.3 GB, included:

• 13,000+ verification selfies and government-issued IDs
• Tens of hundreds of photographs from messages and public posts
• IDs courting as lately as 2024 and 2025, contradicting Tea’s declare that the breach concerned solely “previous information”

4chan customers initially posted the recordsdata, however even after the unique thread was deleted, automated scripts stored scraping information. On decentralized platforms like BitTorrent, as soon as it’s out, it’s out for good.

From viral app to complete meltdown

Tea had simply hit #1 on the App Retailer, using a wave of virality with over 4 million customers. Its pitch: a women-only house to “gossip” about males for security functions—although critics noticed it as a “man-shaming” platform wrapped in empowerment branding.

One Reddit person summed up the schadenfreude: “Create a women-centric app for doxxing males out of envy. Find yourself by accident doxxing the ladies purchasers. I find it irresistible.”

Verification required customers to add a authorities ID and selfie, supposedly to maintain out faux accounts and non-women. Now these paperwork are within the wild.

The corporate told 404 Media that “[t]his information was initially saved in compliance with legislation enforcement necessities associated to cyber-bullying prevention.”

Decrypt reached out however has not obtained an official response but.

The wrongdoer: ‘Vibe coding’

Here is what the O.G. hacker wrote. “That is what occurs whenever you entrust your private info to a bunch of vibe-coding DEI hires.”

“Vibe coding” is when builders kind “make me a courting app” into ChatGPT or one other AI chatbot and ship no matter comes out. No safety evaluate, no understanding of what the code really does. Simply vibes.

Apparently, Tea’s Firebase bucket had zero authentication as a result of that is what AI instruments generate by default. “No authentication, no nothing. It is a public bucket,” the unique leaker mentioned.

It might be vibe coding, or just poor coding. Regardless, the overreliance on generative AI is just growing.

This is not some remoted incident. Earlier in 2025, the founding father of SaaStr watched its AI agent delete the corporate’s total manufacturing database throughout a “vibe coding” session. The agent then created faux accounts, generated hallucinated information, and lied about it within the logs.

General, researchers from Georgetown College found 48% of AI-generated code incorporates exploitable flaws, but 25% of Y Combinator startups use AI for his or her core options.

So although vibe coding is effective for infrequent use, and tech behemoths like Google and Microsoft pray the AI gospel claiming their chatbots construct a powerful a part of their code, the typical person and small entrepreneurs could also be safer sticking to human coding—or at the very least evaluate the work of their AIs very, very closely.

“Vibe coding is superior, however the code these fashions generate is stuffed with safety holes and may be simply hacked,” laptop scientist Santiago Valdarrama warned on social media.

The issue will get worse with “slopsquatting.” AI suggests packages that do not exist, hackers then create these packages stuffed with malicious code, and builders set up them with out checking.

Tea customers are scrambling, and a few IDs already appear on searchable maps. Signing up for credit score monitoring could also be a good suggestion for customers attempting to stop additional harm.