By Snapchat has been in the news a lot lately, but not all of it has been positive press. The anonymous image-sending service was hacked a couple of weeks ago, with whistle blowers aiming to expose an exploit that Snapchat has thus far neglected to address. The result of the breah was a list of 4.6 million usernames and associated phone numbers.
Snapchat didn’t have much to say about the claims immediately following the list going public, but they have come out today with a blog post detailing an update that will now allow you to unlink your mobile phone number from your Snapchat account (something we heard would happen about a week ago).
Your phone number is used for friends to find you in the Find Friends menu, but the recent exposure of this sensitive information seems to have urged Snapchat to make the change. Users can still find each other by searching for usernames. Furthermore, new Snapchat users will now have to verify their phone numbers before they’re allowed to use the Find Friends feature.
Our team continues to make improvements to the Snapchat service to prevent future attempts to abuse our API. We are sorry for any problems this issue may have caused you and we really appreciate your patience and support.
We try not to read too much into things around here, but it sounds like they’re dancing around calling what this is: a hack via an exploit they refused to address. Thankfully it seems they’ve gotten the message, and won’t take potential exploits lightly in the future. You can find Snapchat as a free download in the Google Play Store.
Did they add the feature of responding to data security threats when they’re warned about them and doing so before personal data gets leaked? That’s my favorite feature.
Your comment is sarcasm incarnate. It’s a work of art.
Too little too late for a lot of people.