Have you ever heard of the app Puffchat? Well if you haven’t, don’t worry. Basically Puffchat is a competitor to the popular Snapchat app, which for those unfamiliar allows users to send multimedia content such as photos and videos to other Snapchat users, which will then be deleted from the system after a brief period of time.
This is great for sending sensitive material that you don’t want to get out, although so far the running joke is that Snapchat is more of a platform for sexting, if anything. That being said, Puffchat has been discovered to be not as secure as Snapchat. In fact it seems that it is so insecure that anyone with a little computer knowledge will be able to access supposedly deleted photos and messages. Yikes!
Now instead of actually doing something about it and thanking the hacker, Thomas Hedderwick, for discovering the security flaws, the company’s founder, Michael Suppo, actually threatened Hedderwick with a lawsuit if he did not take down his posts regarding Puffchat’s vulnerability.
In a way it is understandable as broadcasting this information is pretty damaging for the company and their image since it pretty much destroys any credibility regarding security. According to Suppo, he states that the service “will be fixed in due course”, although there is no timeline regarding that update.
In the meantime we guess Puffchat users will just have to refrain from sending any sensitive material, lest there is the off-chance that someone figures out how to access the supposedly deleted content.