Snapchat’s Database Leaked

2014 is turning out to be very unlucky for the social media domain. The very first day of the New Year and already two major companies have become the victim of the malicious intents of notorious hackers. Snapchat became the latest victim of this malicious attack when account information of 4.6 million Snapchat users was leaked on internet. A few hours earlier, Syrian Electronic Army hacked Skype’s Twitter, Facebook accounts and blog.

An anonymous hacker gathered all the information and posted it on a website SnapchatDB.info The information was up for grabs for free untill the website was suspended. The information was available for download as an SQL dump or CSV file.

The message conveyed by the site was, “You are downloading 4.6 million users’ phone number information, along with their usernames. People tend to use the same username around the web so you can use this information to find phone number information associated with Facebook and Twitter accounts, or simply to figure out the phone numbers of people you wish to get in touch with.”

The hackers made use of Snapchat API, which gave them the access to the photo sharing app’s personal database. The hackers said, ‘On the site, the SnapchatDB they censored the last two digits of users’ phone numbers “in order to minimize spam and abuse,” but that they may agree to release their uncensored database “under certain circumstances.”’ The hackers have the uncensored Snapchat database “stored in multiple locations.” Mirrors and torrents of the database are now widely available online.

The message that the hackers had for the social media app was, “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. We hope to see that Snapchat patches the exploit, and patches it well this time. Especially after seeing the magnitude of attention that our leak received, we think that Snapchat will be targeted by other groups if they don’t safeguard user security. We expect Snapchat to roll out a proper patch and notify their users and assure them that they will be more careful with their private information from now on.”

2014 has all of a sudden raised the question of security and privacy on the social media. Beware, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and everyone online (which is almost everyone), who knows what’s next.

via SocialAppsHQ Blog http://www.socialappshq.com/blog/2014/01/02/snapchats-database-leaked/