Pope's official prayer app commits cardinal sin, leaks 700K+ users' info

Summary

Security Pope's official prayer app commits cardinal sin, leaks 700K+ users' info (Security) hole-ier than thou Click To Pray, a prayer app endorsed by the Pope with hundreds of thousands of users worldwide, has leaked people’s names and email addresses for months - or longer - according to an ethical hacker who said she found and reported the security vulnerability six months ago to no avail. This app needs to take a vow of silence when it comes to your personal information.The app, available in seven languages and on iOS, Android, and clicktopray.org, is the official app of the Pope's Worldwide Prayer Network. It connects users across the globe to pray for the Holy Father’s intentions, and as of July 2026, it has 719,517 registered accounts.It’s also very leaky, according to security sleuth BobDaHacker, who says she spotted and disclosed the vulnerability to the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network on January 3. “The vulnerability is still live,” the hacker said in a Friday blog. “Nobody has ever responded. I guess my email wasn't in their prayers." The Reg readers likely remember BobDaHacker for her previous research exposing a free-food flaw in McDonald's ordering system and open controls on Chinese robot manufacturer Pudu Robotics.This latest security hole stems from an Insecure Direct Object Reference (IDOR) bug in the prayer app. This is a very common and easy-to-exploit type of flaw that occurs when a website or an app blindly accepts user-provided input to view or modify resources without checking to see if the user is actually authorized to retrieve the data.“You ask for your own data, the server gives it to you,” BobDaHacker explains. “You ask for someone else's data, the server gives you that too. Thou shalt not authorize, apparently.”When you sign up for a Click To Pray account, the app assigns you a sequential numeric user ID. As BobDaHacker uncovered, the API endpoint GET https://api[.]clicktopray.org/user/users/{id} will return user data for any account -...