They discover a new vulnerability in Snapchat
Definitely this 2014 is not being, for the moment, the best year of the messaging application Snapchat And it is only one month After the sound information theft that affected millions of users and whose security measures were flanked just half an hour after implanting them, now a reappears vulnerability capable of ruining the user's terminal. A new setback for an application that despite everything continues to grow and expand like wildfire.
Apparently, along with fame also comes the attention of curious people and security researchers who test all the functions of Snapchat On this occasion it has been a hacker named Jaime Sánchez who has found a small bug through the application that would not endanger the privacy of the user, but rather the operation of their smartphone in general. All this through a little trick that would affect both terminals iPhone and Android
This is a vulnerability type denial of service The approach is simple: it is enough to achieve saturate the inbox of the user with hundreds of messages from Snapchat to make the terminal bloquee Or so they say in the specialized media TechCrunchIn fact, they comment that iPhone terminals are more affected than Android, seeing the user forced to reboot the device to get it to work normally again. On Android, however, this type of attack would only notably slow down its operation, being equally a chore for the attacked user.
It would suffice for a hacker to use the application's own code or operation to achieve a mass delivery with hundreds of messages in just a few seconds. Something that not everyone can do, but it can be applied to create garbage content or simply annoying a large number of users of this application or specific accounts through this messaging service.Quite a trick when it not only means running out of this messaging service, but also having to dedicate a time to restarting the terminal.
The company of Snapchat is already aware of this problem, and claims to be working to give with a solution that prevents this type of abuse. In fact, they confirm that they want to start conversations with the discoverer of this vulnerability to have all the details. For his part, Jamie Sánchez has declared to the newspaper Los Angeles Time, where he has given learn of their finding, that Snapchat “has no respect for the cybersecurity research community”.
In short, new problems for a messaging application that continues to drawing attention both due to the growing number of users and investments that are add up, such as the increasingly frequent and well-known security and privacy problems that are discovered.At least on this occasion it is not the user data that is at stake Just your patience and the proper functioning of the terminal.
