About two weeks back we reported that Snapchat had been struck by a massive security breach which lead to over 4.6 million usernames and phone numbers being compromised. A downloadable database of the stolen information was also published online. A security group called Gibson Security had alerted Snapchat of several exploits but the company claimed it had safeguards in place. A fortnight after the entire drama, the startup has now formally apologized to its users.
It took Snapchat a couple of days to acknowledge that it had indeed been hacked, assuring users that apart from usernames and phone numbers, no other information including users’ snaps were leaked. Following the acknowledgement, it released an update for its mobile apps which brought a few fixes. Quite a few people noticed that the startup wasn’t particularly apologetic about the hack, since it didn’t quite say that it was sorry. Today Snapchat released yet another update for its Android and iOS applications which improves the Find Friends feature and lets users opt-out of linking their phone number with their user name. Users will now have to verify their phone numbers before they can use said feature. “We are very sorry,” says Snapchat, while promising that it continues to make improvements to prevent future attempts to abuse its API.
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