Snapchat tricked by scammers into revealing employee information

Feb 29, 2016, 20:56

A Snapchat payroll employee sent sensitive information about 700 current and former employees after falling for a phishing scam.

There's no doubt this is embarrassing for the company, however, the situation does highlight just how easy it can be for even those who work in the IT sector to fall prey to targeted phishing campaigns. The company describes the incident as "isolated", also saying that a single individual from within the company is responsible. For example, an IT department, one of the most common targets, will hold master credentials. The FBI has been alerted to the breach, and all affected employees are reportedly being offered two years of identity theft insurance and monitoring free of charge.

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Wieland Alge, general manager for EMEA at Barracuda Networks, explained that this type of scam is very likely to succeed because the position of the apparent sender of the email often stops people thinking. "IT security teams must implement countermeasures against targeted attacks against this channel", he added. No matter how large or small, no company should ever be ashamed of being a victim. Emails will be tailored to look at legitimate as possible and often contain an urgent tone, attempting to not give the targeted employee the time to be sceptical about what he or she is being asked to do. In the last three months of 2015, the report noted, over half of the organisations surveyed mentioned that they had seen an increase in whaling attacks. Some of the most successful phishing attacks are those that successfully impersonate a person, particularly if that person is well-known to the recipient.

Within four hours of the incident, the company confirmed it was a phishing attack and reported it to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

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This is not the first time that Snapchat has encountered a cyber-attack. Despite responding "swiftly and aggressively", Snapchat has been forced to contact a slew of employees past and present to let them know their financial details may have been compromised. The company says it will redouble its staff training around security in a bid to make sure this doesn't happen again. More than 4 million of its users had their usernames and phone numbers leaked online in 2014 after hackers said the company wasn't taking a system vulnerability seriously enough.

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