Millions of accounts are hacked on the app “Snap Chat” this New Years. It appears to have around 4.6 million account numbers and names available for download on the hackers website, making names and partial phone numbers available for download. In a statement to a technology blog called Tech Crunch the hackers said, “Our motivation behind the release was to raise the public awareness around the issue, and also put public pressure on Snapchat to get this exploit fixed. It is understandable that tech startups have limited resources but security and privacy should not be a secondary goal. Security matters as much as user experience does.” Last week Gibson Security had published a code that could supposedly enable such a hack.
For those of you who don’t know Snap Chat is an app that is used primarily by teenagers to send photos with their friends and share messages. Photos can be timed to a number of seconds and then disappear. Snap Chat has become popular with teenagers since their photos can’t be duplicated and if someone takes a screenshot of their photo they are immediately notified.
Snap Chat released a statement on their blog last week, “Theoretically, if someone were able to upload a huge set of phone numbers, like every number in an area code, or every possible number in the U.S., they could create a database of the results and match usernames to phone numbers that way. Over the past year we’ve implemented various safeguards to make it more difficult to do. We recently added additional counter-measures and continue to make improvements to combat spam and abuse.” In the past the ever so popular app has been offered 3 billion dollars reportedly by Facebook and turned it down. The company currently is not making any money and with this recent breach in information it’s clear something will have to be done. To check to see if you have been affected go to Gibson Security Link and enter your username.