Snapchat warns its active users to stay away from all its apps

On Tuesday morning, Snapchat messaging service warned its 100 million active users to stay away from all its apps as it was hacked.

Snapchat, messaging service which enables users to share photo’s or video’s which will be deleted as soon as the recipient see them. But Snapchat since from last week was under fire. As the Snapchat was hacked by a third party service which has stolen more than 13 gigabytes of data which includes the users photos that was stored on the third party site. This hack has affected nearly 200,000 Snapchat users as their photos were made public.

The photos & videos are hacked from an unauthorized third party Snapchat service, Snapsaved. And the users of this service are mostly teenagers who are between 13 & 17 years age group. Snapchat starting from its debut has remained as the third most popular Social media app in the U.S. after Facebook & Facebook’s Instagram, a photo sharing service. This popularity is mainly due to the Snapchat’s ability to automatically delete messages.

This hack of Snapsaved came into light following the recent Apple’s iCloud service, which targeted celebrity’s photos of Actress Jennifer Lawrence. Today in its new blog post Snapchat has blamed the third party services that hacked its data & for making Snapchat users at risk. “It takes time and a lot of resources to build an open and trustworthy third-party application ecosystem,” Snapchat wrote today. “That’s why we haven’t provided a public API to developers and why we prohibit access to the private API we use to provide our service.”

On Friday Snapchat has stated to CNET News that: Snapchat users “victimized” by using third-party Snapchat services, which often back up the photos and videos posted to Snapchat without the sender’s consent.

Snapchat also told CNET News said that third-party use of its API is, “a practice that we expressly prohibit in our Terms of Use” because they “compromise our users’ security.”

Security experts viewed that Snapchat, founded in 2011 should have secured its API & it at least feels the responsibility for the hack would have better security. And the most annoying fact is usage of Terms of Service instead of a Security check.

If a third-party service knows how an API is built, all it needs are user login credentials to connect to the service. “Whether or not the API is public or private, if users are providing their account information then hackers can still make use of the API to access user content,” Wardle said. End-to-end encryption, which is used to protect electronic messages from being spied on, would help Snapchat ensure not only user privacy but also limit API access, Wardle said.