“We acknowledged in a blog post last Friday that it was possible for an attacker to use the functionality of Find Friends to upload a large number of random phone numbers and match them with Snapchat usernames. On New Years Eve, an attacker released a database of partially redacted phone numbers and usernames. No other information, including Snaps, was leaked or accessed in these attacks.”
This blog post basically explains how they knew this would happen, yet they didn’t do anything about it. It’s truly impressive how these guys still seems have plenty of ego, even after a massive security breach that exposed private information of its’ users. These guys are still too proud to apologize for its’ carelessness. But promises to release an update to allow users to opt-out of “Find Friends” option, which was found to be the source of the exploit.
Read Also: Did Snapchat Just Turned Down the Deal of a Lifetime?
In the meantime, the hackers behind this whole story spoke to The Verge explaining its’ cause behind their radical actions and to let us know that they have no connection to Gibson Security, which leaked the Snapchat API publicly in the first place allowing anyone to hack the database.
” 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,” SnapchatDB told The Verge. “Security matters as much as user experience does.“
[Photo: Photo Giddy-Flickr]
(All images, trademarks shown on this post are the property of their respective owners)
Follow @nrjperera – Roshan Jerad Perera