Hackers claim to expose phone information of 4.6 million Snapchat users

SnapChat

Phone numbers paired with user names of over 4.6 million alleged Snapchat users were posted online by hackers, a few days after a security research group claimed a vulnerability in the social sharing service that could allow attackers to match phone numbers to Snapchat accounts.

“This database contains username and phone number pairs of a vast majority of the Snapchat users,” said a post on website SnapchatDB.info. The account has since been suspended, apparently by the hosting service. A cached version of the site can be viewed here.

The information was acquired through the recently patched Snapchat exploit and is being shared with the public to raise awareness on the issue, according to the post. “The company was too reluctant at patching the exploit until they knew it was too late and companies that we trust with our information should be more careful when dealing with it,” it added.

The hackers said they had “censored” for now the last two digits of the phone numbers in order to minimize spam and abuse, but asked people to contact them for the uncensored database, which they may agree to release under certain circumstances.

Gibson Security had published proof-of-concept code last week that takes advantage of the “find_friends” feature in the Snapchat application programming interface (API) to iterate and match the phone numbers of users to their Snapchat accounts in a short period of time. Gibson first revealed the vulnerability and other issues in August.

“Theoretically, if someone were able to upload a huge set of phone numbers, like every number in an area code, or every possible number in the U.S., they could create a database of the results and match usernames to phone numbers that way,” Snapchat wrote in response last week. “Over the past year we’ve implemented various safeguards to make it more difficult to do,” it added. “We recently added additional counter-measures and continue to make improvements to combat spam and abuse.”

After the release of the SnapchatDB database, Gibson said in a Twitter message that it knew nothing about SnapchatDB, but it was a matter of time until something like it happened. “Also the exploit works still with minor fixes,” it added. 

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Snapchat, Vine among top smartphone apps of 2013

Snapshot, Vine, and Candy Crush Saga earned coveted spots on smartphones this year, making them among the most downloaded apps of the year.

There are more than a million apps on Apple Inc's App Store and Google Inc's Play store, the two dominant marketplaces for apps, which see billions of downloads each year.

This year, the most downloaded apps were new takes on communication, gaming, and entertainment, according to mobile app experts.

"2013 was a really interesting year in terms of maturation, milestones and new trends," said Craig Palli, chief strategy officer at Fiksu, a mobile marketing company based in Boston. "The most downloaded apps were in familiar categories, but offered new twists," he added.

While old favorites such as Instagram, Facebook and Twitter - available for iPhone, Android and other devices - continued to be popular ways of communicating with friends, Snapchat eclipsed them in downloads in 2013, becoming the sixth most downloaded free app of the year on the App Store, according to Apple.

"Snapchat went from being a niche app to achieving much more critical mass, so much so that Facebook was reportedly willing to spend billions of dollars to acquire the company," said Palli.

With Snapchat, users can send photos and videos that disappear shortly after they are viewed.

Launched in 2011, the app's user base continued to grow rapidly in 2013, with over 13 million people using the app in October, according to the lastest available estimates from global information and measurement company Nielsen. In December alone, over 400 million pieces of content were shared through the app, according to Snapchat, based in Venice, CA.

Vine, a video sharing app released earlier this year by microblogging company Twitter Inc, was the fourth most downloaded free app in 2013. The app, for iPhone, Android and other devices, allows users to share videos under six seconds in length. Nielsen estimates over 6 million people in the US were using the app in October of this year.

Snapchat and Vine fall into a category that mobile analytics firm Flurry calls camera-enhanced messaging, which they said grew eightfold in 2013.

"The communications category underwent phenomenal growth this year. Messaging apps like Snapchat, Line, Kakao (KakaoTalk) and WeChat are all exploding and becoming bigger than the carriers in their home countries in terms of users," said Simon Khalaf, chief executive of San Francisco-based company Flurry.

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