8 photosPhoto: Bogdan Popa/autoevolution
It’s 2026, and social media accounts are seemingly still getting hacked. The latest high-profile target is Waze, the Google-owned company building the traffic navigation app we all use every day.
A hacker took control of the official Waze X (formerly Twitter) account approximately 12 hours ago, when the first post – now pinned – went live on the social network.
“Effective 11/26, Waze will deactivate this account,” the hacker tweeted.
The same message also includes a reference to what actually happened, more or less suggesting that this claimed deactivation won’t happen. “I stole the logins,” the hacker said.
While they warned that the account would be deactivated on November 26, this obviously won’t happen because the Google-owned company will regain control of the X handle in the coming hours. It’s still surprising that Waze is still locked out so many hours after the hacker broke in, though.
“The social media manager is locked out,” the hacker said in the description of the profile.
Photo: X
Three other posts have been posted in the meantime, with the most recent message going live approximately 7 hours ago. The messages are still live at the time of writing, and this is a sign that Waze hasn’t yet reclaimed the account on X.
While some people seem to believe that this is just a marketing campaign put together by Waze, this is rather unlikely, considering a company would never advertise the removal of a public account – not even as a prank, that is – as many people could take it for granted.
Oddly, few people seem to care about the messages posted by the hacker on X.
The original message, which included the notification that the Waze account would be deactivated on November 26, received only 6 replies, while a follow-up message received only 2 replies. The number of likes is also very low, with only 11 people clicking the heart icon on the most recent message posted by the hacker.
The Waze account has 247K followers.
What this incident meansWhile an unauthorized person received access to Waze’s X account, this doesn’t mean that your data is at risk in any way.
The hacker only obtained access to the social media account, being able to post messages on the social network. That’s all they can do, as they themselves acknowledge in a follow-up post. “Who got the keys to a global brand account now?” the hacker asks rhetorically.
Photo: Bogdan Popa/autoevolution
All your data is safe, and this incident only concerns the X account – not Waze’s platform. This means the hacker only got the credentials for the X account, logged in, and therefore received privileges to post messages.
The X account is not connected to the navigation app directly, and no user data is exposed.
The 2020 security bugWhile this security incident doesn’t mean much for Waze, a more serious vulnerability was discovered in 2020 when a security engineer discovered a security flaw that allowed him to track users on the map and see where they were going.
The engineer discovered a way to access the ID associated with other Waze users, which you can see on the map using a feature called Moods. With Moods, Waze users can appear on the map with different avatars configurable from the app’s settings menu.
Photo: Bogdan Popa/autoevolution
The application did not change the ID of a user over time, so once you figured out the ID of a specific user, you could follow them on the map.
The investigation continued, and the security engineer eventually found a way to determine the username behind a specific ID.
The vulnerability was privately reported to the Google-owned company and was patched before all these details were made public.
Waze updatesWhen it’s not working on fixing security problems, the Waze team is busy with actually useful capabilities. The company has recently teamed up with Garmin to highlight cyclists on the map using location data provided by Garmin smartwatches.
Garmin offers a feature called LiveTrack, which allows users to broadcast their live location to selected contacts. Thanks to the partnership with Waze, this location information is forwarded to Waze, which displays it on the map for nearby drivers.
The purpose is to make drivers aware that a cyclist is on the road, giving them more time to slow down and approach the location more carefully. In addition to the cyclist icon on the map, Waze users also get a notification on the screen.
Photo: Bogdan Popa/autoevolution
The feature can be enabled by any Garmin user with a smartwatch that supports LiveTrack and doesn’t involve any costs. Once activated, the location is forwarded to Waze when a cycling session begins. No other details are exposed to Waze, and the location information is deleted once the workaround is finalized.
Garmin Edge bike computers also come with similar capabilities, assuming they are fitted with LiveTrack location sharing. All settings are integrated into the Garmin Connect app, and Waze users don’t need to set up anything on their devices.
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