Snapchat and Skype were hacked over the holiday by two different groups coincidentally. Snapchat is a photo messaging app that allows people to send pictures and drawings to each other. Skype is a video chat application that is now owned by Microsoft.
A website was created on New Year’s Eve named SnapChatDB.info that demonstrated an attack on a known vulnerability. Gibson Security released information on Christmas Day that showed vulnerabilities that SnapChat was vulnerable to and pointed out weaknesses in the Find Friends feature as well. SnapChat responded with a blog two days later that stated that these vulnerabilities are not worth concern.
Almost overnight they were attacked and 4.6 million accounts were available for browsing on SnapChat.info. The hackers that created the site state that that this attack and SnapChat.info was purely for education and the site has been taken down. The hackers stated that “It is understandable that tech start-ups have limited resources but security and privacy should not be a secondary goal.”
Skype was also attacked by a different group of hackers over this weekend. The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) is a collective of hackers that all support the Syrian Government. On January first a tweet went out from Skype’s official Twitter account stating, “Stop Spying on People!” The Syrian Electronic Army were quick to take responsibility.
After this tweet was published you could see messages posted on Skype’s Facebook pages and other blog sites from SEA. “Don’t use Microsoft emails (Hotmail, Outlook). They are monitoring your accounts and selling the data to the government.” The group also posted Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s retiring CEO’s, contact information on Skype’s twitter account as well.
The Syrian Army commonly targets social media accounts of companies and public figures such as: President Obama, CNN and The Associated Press.
(Image source: iCLIPART)