Special training programs designed to strengthen the privacy
Snapchat posted a blog article about what happened and how the data was stolen from the company. In the post they highlighted the incident was isolated and there are no other breaches in the system, which may worry employees and users. They also added no user suffered from the incident.
Snapchat stated they contacted the FBI and offered the affected employees, both current and past, Identify theft insurance for two years, to compensate for the damages.
The company stated they’ve reinforced their “rigorous” safety and security training programs, to prevent similar incident from happening again.
The hacker had not been identified
The hacker or group of hackers who conducted the attack on Snapchat was/were not yet identified. The attack used a method called “spear phishing”, which targets specific persons. This type of attack is aimed towards a specific person, instead of random users and it’s more dangerous than other types of attacks.
Snapchat is not the first time involved in a leaking scandal
Despite their already “rigorous” training, Snapchat suffered hacker’s attacks in the past: in October 2014, the company was involved in the scandal of naked celebrity photos leak. More than 98K of private photos and videos were made public.
Snapchat didn’t said what type of employee information was leaked, but given the fact it was payroll information, the name, financial information, salary, address and email are definitely among the data made public.
However, Snapchat can breathe easy – there were cases when the companies had a lot more to lose from such attacks. For example, Ubiquiti Networks sent a .7 million payment after receiving an email from someone impersonating their CEO.
This attack shows that not even millennials are safe from hackers; until couple of years ago, it was believed only old persons, who are unfamiliar with the computer can be hacked. The reality had proven that even high tech millennials, who are familiar with phishing techniques, can be fooled.
Snapchat works on the principle of deleting sensitive content, at least this is how it was at first. Users can exchange messages, text and video content, then the content is automatically deleted, to keep the data safe. But last year, Snapchat changed its policy and announced they will be saving images, which stirred a lot of anger among users.
