Yo App Hacked By College Students: Messaging Service Draws Unwanted Attention From Hackers

Yo, the simple messaging app that lets you send only that word to your friends, has reportedly been hacked.

TechCrunch reported Friday that three college students, including one from Georgia Tech, have discovered several security vulnerabilities that let them gain access to individual Yo user phone numbers.

The Georgia Tech student behind the hack explained that they were also able to make “yo” messages appear to be from any user and spam individual users with “yo” Messages.

Yo founder Or Arbel confirmed to TechCrunch that the messaging app was “having security issues,” but didn’t go into specifics about the hacks experienced by Yo's developer, Life Before Us, LLC. The San Francisco company reportedly hired a security team to deal with the problems.

The messaging app has gone viral on Apple Inc.’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) App Store and Google Inc.’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Play Store over the past two days, drawing tons of attention from curious mobile users and other hackers who have reportedly found other security vulnerabilities in it.

One such example was seen in a Vine video posted on Thursday, showing the Yo notification sound replaced with the 1987 Rick Astley pop hit “Never Gonna Give You Up.”

Another image of an iOS popup notification declaring that Yo had been hacked has been circulating the Web as well.

The pop up notification reads:

"wow. many 1337. such bad security.
I hacked Yo. Use hastag #YoBeenHacked to talk about it."

According to CBS News, the Yo app has raised $1 million from the angel investor fund of Moshe Hogeg, head of the Mobli image sharing app.