It is now confirmed that Snapchat was hacked by hackers. A website SnapchatDB.info has published the details of more than 4.6 million Snapchat users. And this data is available for download. Currently the website is down and its hosting account has been suspended. This leaked data also contains the details of Snapchat founder. SnapchatDB has censored the last two digits of phone numbers to minimize spam and abuse.
Last week, ZDNet published an article that Gibson Security researcher found vulnerability in Snapchat and hackers can exploit it to get user details. But Snapchat ignored the alert. After that Gibson Security published the exploit publicly. It seems that hackers have used this exploit to get users’ details. The exploit shows how one can access the name, username and phone number of users through Snapchat’s Android and iOS API.
If you use Snapchat, you can see if your data was also included in the leaked data via this page. It was created by developer Robbie Trencheny.
Domain of the website created yesterday and name is protected. But it was revealed that mailing address and contact number belong to Panama.
Purpose of the SnapchatDB was to show Snapchat that it should hear the voice of White Hat hackers. Many companies have a program for security researcher and also award bug bounty for finding security vulnerabilities. It would be a lesson to all tech companies and they will try to reduce the gap between company and security researchers.