Steven Hong
Snapchat is a photo messaging application developed by a group of Stanford students in September of ‘11. With around 400 million snaps sent daily, messages, Snapchat is quickly gaining popularity. Snapchat has caught the eye of both big companies and everyday people.
Snapchat is unique in that it lets users send messages that are deleted after a certain time. The sender determines the seconds the receiver gets to see a photo.
Facebook’s three billion dollar purchase offer and Google’s attempt to outbid Facebook with four billion dollars brought much attention to the app. Snapchat ended up rejecting both offers, which came to be a surprise, as Snapchat generates no revenue whatsoever.
But Snapchat has come under fire for recent username and phone number leaks. A whopping 4.6 million accounts had info leaked on New Year’s Eve.
Less than a week before the incident, Snapchat dismissed the threat, which was brought to their attention by Gibson Security.
In a blog post it was claimed that “Over the past few years we’ve implemented various safeguards to make it more difficult to do [match phone numbers with usernames], we’ve recently added additional counter-measures and continue to make improvements to combat spam and abuse.”
Of course a week later, the hackers were able to do what the company specifically tried to prevent. They even responded to an interview request saying that they did it to bring awareness to the issue. They wanted to show how much security matters, and put pressure on Snapchat to get it fixed.
There could be other possible motivations for the hack however. A website called SnapchatDB.info, now down, claimed to be offering account usernames with phone numbers. The site said it would offer databases to third party sites, if the circumstances were right. This, of course, probably meant the exchange of money.
