Flaws in code put customer data of four consumer internet platforms at risk

BENGALURU : Over the past two months, a researcher has unearthed security flaws in at least four consumer Internet platforms— online fashion and beauty retailer Nykaa, two-wheeler rental platform Bounce, furniture e-tailer Pepperfry, and search engine Justdial— which have potentially put data of millions of customers at risk, even as the companies have rushed to fix them.

Bengaluru-based security researcher Ehraz Ahmed said the security flaws have exposed personal data of at least 200 million customers. The most common flaw among these apps were defective application programming interfaces (APIs)—a set of codes that allows an application to communicate with databases and fetch information within the application environment.