Snapchat is doing a terrible job at handling its recent security breach

Snapchat’s inner circle probably had a rougher New Year’s hangover than most, seeing as 4.6 million accounts were compromised on January 1. The security breach happened after an Australian hacking collective called Gibson Security published a detailed account of a gap in Snapchat’s security system. Gibson Security called this the “Find Friends exploit” since it could potentially unveil Snapchat user phone numbers using the Find Friends feature. Snapchat published a blog post addressing the exploit, but didn’t boost security enough to prevent the actual information hack, which was carried out by an anonymous group running a website called SnapchatDB. Snapchat acknowledged Gibson Security’s efforts (but didn’t bother to name the group) in another blog post today, and provided a dedicated email address for security issues, which is a start.