How Cameo’s Private Celebrity Videos Were Open to the World
CYBER
VICE
4 • 645 Ratings
🗓️ 27 February 2020
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It used to be that if you wanted to interact with your favourite celebrity you’d have to do elaborate things like camp out near a red carpet in Hollywood, lying in wait, until you finally got the chance to scream-ask Queen Bey for her autograph amongst a gaggle of other fans.
Well, in 2020, like everything else in this world, including our dating lives, our health, and voting there’s an app for paying celebrities to give you personalized shoutout videos. That’s right, the app Cameo provides you a list of celebrities ranging from Snoop Dogg to Michael Rappaport, that you can select, pay, and then receive everything from a personalized ‘happy birthday’ to a ‘get well soon’ from your favourite celeb.
But through a flaw in its website's design, a security researcher discovered that many of these personal videos were available to anyone, including those that had been set to 'private'. Motherboard then wrote code to find the private videos en masse.
Joseph Cox, Motherboard reporter of cybercrime and sketchiness extraordinaire, tells CYBER how he broke the story and got Gilbert Gotfried to verify the flaw on Cameo’s site with a personal message using that lovable voice of his.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Tann, it's got the code it's going to launch. |
| 0:10.7 | It's a unit system. |
| 0:13.1 | I know this. |
| 0:15.1 | It's all the files of the whole park. |
| 0:17.3 | It tells her everything. |
| 0:19.1 | Sir, he's uploading the virus. |
| 0:21.8 | Eagle won. |
| 0:22.6 | The package is being delivered. |
| 0:25.1 | It used to be that if you wanted to interact with your favorite celebrity, |
| 0:28.3 | you'd have to camp out near a red carpet in Hollywood, |
| 0:31.0 | just lying in wait until you speedily got the chance to scream-ask Queen Bee for autographed |
| 0:36.3 | amongst the gaggle of other fans. |
| 0:38.3 | Well, in 2020, like everything else in this world, including our dating lives and our health, |
| 0:44.3 | there's an app for paying celebrities to give you personalized shout-out videos. |
| 0:48.3 | I heard about a website called Cameo, and so it lets you pay celebrities and they'll record whatever you want. Have you heard about |
| 0:54.8 | this? But through a flaw in Cameo's website's design, a security researcher discovered that many of |
| 0:59.3 | these personal videos were available to anyone, including those that had been set to private. |
| 1:04.5 | Motherboard then wrote code to find the private videos amass. |
| 1:09.1 | Joseph Cox, our reporter of crime and sketchiness extraordinaire, |
| 1:12.8 | broke the story and even got Gilbert Godfried to verify to us with a personalized message |
| 1:17.4 | in that lovable voice of his. That's coming up right now on cyber. |
| 1:26.9 | So Joseph, in 2020, we not only have apps for everything, including dating and your health, |
... |
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