Having the app that you spent only a matter of hours creating go viral and attract a huge number of downloads is obviously brilliant .... the only problem being that it's not actually ready! Of course, the thing that has been neglected in favour of getting it working is security ... and it's not long before the flaws have been uncovered.
It's great the they ended up employing one of the hackers though. Hacking, when not malicious, can actually perform an important task for you and wake you up to the importance of security when you've previously not been giving it the priority that you should have been.
The app, which does nothing more than let users send each other "Yo's" [sic], messages containing nothing but the word "Yo", confirmed it was the victim of a hack on Friday morning. The attackers, three students from Georgia Tech university, could push messages to users' phones, as well as read personal data from the company's user database. "Yo started as a weekend project and exploded a little too soon," Or Arbel, Yo's developer and founder, said. "We were just finishing up rewriting the infrastructure in a proper and secure way, as suitable for production grade apps, when it suddenly blew up and went viral."
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/23/yo-founder-hack-hires-hackers-chat-app