Snapchat promises to improve the privacy of its users
After the attack suffered on New Year's Day on the Snapchat application that exposed the information of more than 4, 6 million users, those responsible for the application have shown their faces. Thus, they confirm the event, explain the situation and take responsibility by promising an application update with new security measures capable of protecting the user's privacy. Issues that were to be expected and that we detail below.
The information comes from the official blog of the company, where those responsible are aware of the latest events. Thus, they confirm the vulnerability that has allowed the data leak of millions of users on New Year's Day, and explain its origin. In fact, Snapchat has been aware of this problem since last August, when a security expert informed them. Despite the new security measures, the application continued to present vulnerabilities at Christmas. Finally, on New Year's Day this problem took on a new dimension.
As they explain, the vulnerability lies in the function Search for Friends And it is that one of the initial problems of Snapchat was to find other users using the app to share images, videos, or messagesThat is why its creators decided to create this function, with which the user can enter their telephone number to associate it with their account Snapchat In this way the app can show which contacts in your phone book also use the app for direct contact. The problem is that a bug allows entire lists of phone numbers to be compared to associate them with user accounts and thus obtain their data. Just what happened on the first day of the year.
Faced with such a problem Snapchat claims to be working on a solution. In fact, it confirms that there will be an update of the application with new security measures, among which stands out being able to choose not to use the Find Friends function after verifying the phone number. This would eliminate the risk of associating your user account with your number in a supposed attack.There are also other features such as restrictions and limitations so that this kind of abuse does not occur again in the application.
Along with this, those responsible for Snapchat want to establish direct contact with security experts who detect new weaknesses that can be exploited and that compromise the security and privacy of users, which is why it now offers a specific email account with which to contact and report this kind of vulnerabilities . All this to ensure that they do not suffer attacks again or compromise the users of your application. And it is that they claim to be dedicated to preventing abuse in an application created especially for users to express themselves comfortably.
The application Snapchat has achieved great success throughout the past 2003, where not only its number of users has increased, but also also its financing and investments to continue growing.It has also added new features so that sharing photos and videos with an expiration date is not your only feature. At the moment the new update with the promised security measures has not arrived, but it will soon through Google Play and App Store fully free
