SNAPCHAT exposed

Consulting firm Gibson Security warned less than a week ago: the data of users of the popular instant messaging application Snapchat was easy to hack. And this New Year's Eve a group of anonymous hackers has demonstrated it by publishing on the SnapchatDB page –currently out of service due to the flood of visits it has received in a few hours– the information referring to 4,600,000 customers of this service, with their respective names and phones. In the material, disseminated through two files in SQL and CSV format respectively, the last two digits of the numbers of those affected have been removed with the aim of"minimizing the spam" that the victims of this action could receive, as reported by the specialized portal TechCrunch, where it is indicated that the purpose of the hackers is to alert about the danger that subscribers of this service are in if the company does not make an effort to protect them. In any case, the attack could be fully materialized upon the publication of these two digits –supposedly they can be requested by email from the authors of the database– and other information about the 26 million consumers of the app in the United States. Precisely all those affected come from this country and Canada, as clarified by the Reddit portal. Critical comments about the high vulnerability of Snapchat, an application that allows the sending of messages that self-destruct shortly after, date back to August 2013, although it was not until December that this offensive was perpetrated, carried out despite the fact that, from the company itself, it had been alleged that work was being done to improve the security of its customers. Before this incident, large companies in the technology sector, including the social network Facebook, had been interested in buying it.