Snapchat Hackers Release Account Info On Millions Of Users
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) -- The popular social photo sharing app Snapchat has been hit by an unnamed hacker group.
Account information for more than 4.6 million users appeared online Tuesday.
Usernames and partial phone numbers were available for download on the hackers' website for a time.
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The site has been suspended. The hackers said they released the information in a "white hat" effort to make Snapchat beef up security.
This comes after warnings in August of 2013 from security teams that user names could be matched to phone numbers, despite privacy settings. Gibson Security continues to share on its website detailed information about Snapchat's "API" or "application programming interface" that would allow programmers to figure out how to exploit the vulnerabilities.
Snapchat was created by former Stanford students Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy. It launched in 2011, and has become incredibly popular with teenage users, with users sending over 20 million photos each day. The images are only available for viewing for a short time before being removed by the app.
There was no mention of the security breach on Snapchat's official blog as of Thursday morning.
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