Friday, January 3, 2014

Snapchat Locks Down Friend Finding Feature After Security Breach

Venice-based social messaging phenom Snapchat has locked down its Find Friends features, saying that it has improved security on the feature, after reports of the widespread release of around 4.6 million phone numbers and usernames from the service.

Snapchat's Find Friends service had allowed Snapchat users to enter the phone number of their friends to get their username, a feature which had been abused by hackers to ferret out the list of Snapchat users and their phone numbers. On New Year's Eve, Snapchat said that hackers had used the Find Friends feature to randomly input numbers into the system, and match them with Snapchat usernames. Snapchat said that it will be releasing an updated version of its app which will allow its users to opt out of using the Find Friends feature, is improving its rate limiting features, and also adding other restrictions to attempt to address future abuse of the service.

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