Phishing Attack Threatens Privacy of over 55,000 Snapchat Users

A complicated phishing campaign that one government official of UK flagged during July 2017 hacked more than 55,000 Snapchat users. A website named KLKViral understandably emerging from an earlier assault within the Dominican Republic catalogued user ids and passwords along with accounts of Snapchat. The website tricked end-users with a fake Snapchat login page that induced the platform's owner firm, Snap to apologize.

End-users hacked accounted for merely a small number of the total 187m Snapchat users. The attack occurs at Snap's very critical time because there's been a flop of the firm's video-recording spectacles as well as a blast of the latest Snapchat's redesign.

Understandably, an officer of the government at UK's Dorset cautioned Snapchat of the hacking assault. Thereafter, during late July 2017, engineering director of Snapchat sent e-mail to the team telling it about the privacy violation. Thesun.co.uk posted this, February 19, 2018.

Incidentally, by the term 'phishing' we refer to that cyber-assault wherein Internauts are so duped that they divulge their private details. Within the Snapchat phishing instance, end-users were sent web-links, which if followed, took them onto one phony Snapchat login page. Suppose an end-user typed in his details there, his user id and password would get directly transmitted to hackers.

News of the Snapchat attack comes when Snap is in a delicate situation. The firm's latest major change in Snapchat's design had end-users wholly put it down, when one online petition for returning to the earlier design resulted in more than one million people to sign it. During the previous week, Evan Spiegel CEO stated the changed design was going to stay. However, exposed pictures indicate the firm has taken the criticisms on its side.

The firm, since the attack, has been adopting several measures of precaution for making end-users' accounts safer. As soon as Snapchat learnt of the assault, it suspended several thousand dubious A/Cs, while taking Google's help it suspended the KlKviral.org website that believably had a role to play within the entire phishing scheme in question. The website won't be there within search results while it's now flagged to be one harmful site Web-surfers shouldn't visit.

» SPAMfighter News - 2/27/2018