Snapchat Falls Victim to Phishing Scam

Current and past employees of Snapchat have their identities compromised due to phishing scam…

According to CNN Money, last Friday a phishing scam was sent out to Snapchat employees in an attempt to gain payroll information for current and past employees.  The email was disguised as a request from the company’s CEO, Evan Spiegel.  One employee opened the email, which caused the breach.

The breach affected current and past employees, and put their identity at risk.  The users of Snapchat are reportedly not affected.

Once the company realized the breach had occurred, they had patched the security gap within four hours.  The company also reported the matter to the FBI for further investigation.  Snapchat takes great pride in their security and privacy measures, and is working diligently to ensure something like this does not happen again.

PC Pitstop’s Vice President on Cybersecurity, Dodi Glenn, weighed in on the matter to Legal Tech News:

[Snapchat] “did the right thing by notifying the people that were impacted by this phish, and by letting the FBI know about the breach.  Now, they need to put a plan into place to prevent this from happening in the future since social engineering isn’t going away any time soon.  I can only hope they educate their employees in the very near future about what to look for, when it comes to phishing and other attacks, but I don’t believe this occurrence will adversely affect the number of Snapchat users, since it didn’t directly impact them.”

 

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