Snapchat Data Breach: What Went Wrong and What to Do

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ddpruitt

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Jun 4, 2012
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Snapchat Data Breach: What Went Wrong

I thing the answer is the same as pretty much any other major security breach. Security was/is and ancillary concern, someone let them know there was a flaw you could run the titanic through, they didn't want to spend money to fix it, and the rest is history. Until companies take security as a serious threat to their bottom line they're not going to do anything to improve it, we've seen this over and over again.
 

rRansom

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Hey, we found a bug in your system. No? You don't want to fix it? Yeah, let me just let the world know how bad your security is. Case closed.
 

Steve_Lockstep

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It's not really responsible to encourage people to click on links that purport to tell you if you're affected by this or any other breach. There are dozens of such links tweeting around that are probably phishing scams.
Given the nature of this breach -- someone used a now well-known API to poll the database millions of times -- we should probably simply assume that the entire Snapchat database has been accessed (even if only 4.6M records have been posted). If you are not in the 4.6M then you annot be sure you're safe. And what are people going to do in any event? Change their phone number? It's too late! The grave thing about breached phone numbers is that they are going to be used by organised criminals as indices to link multiple data sets; the phone number in itself is almost irrelevant. Nobody should ever give their phone number to a social site.
The long term personal ramifications could be card fraud or identity takeover. The only ting people can do if they're Snapchat users is to stay vigilant, closely watch their card statements, maybe subscribe to a credit watch service ... all of which is good advice these days regardless.
 

alextheblue

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You're recommending a password change... were passwords leaked as well?

"The data collection is not a true hack; it simply uses Snapchat's own tools to massively scrape data from Snapchat's own servers, much in the way a Google search-engine "spider" collects data from websites for archiving."

Everything I've read to date makes it sound like they've mass-scraped usernames and phone numbers (which is bad enough) but I haven't heard anything about passwords being compromised.
 

deborahjmurray

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my classmate's aunt makes $76 an hour on the internet. She has been unemployed for eight months but last month her check was $20677 just working on the internet for a few hours. check this =============> www.jobs39.com
 

lindagharnden

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til I saw the receipt saying $8589, I accept ...that...my best friend was like they say actualy erning money part-time on their laptop.. there best friend haz done this less than twenty one months and just now repaid the morgage on there home and bourt a top of the range Citroën DS. read more►●►●►●► www.jobs39.com
 
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