Less than a week after concerns were raised about security at Snapchat, phone numbers and usernames of the message-sharing service's more than 4.6 million North American users have been leaked online.
A group of hackers exposed the numbers, blurring the final two digits of each, in a self-titled effort to "raise awareness of the site's security issues," the Daily Mail reported.
"This information was acquired through the recently patched Snapchat exploit and is being shared with the public to raise awareness on the issue," the hackers said on their website, as quoted by the Daily Mail.
"The company was too reluctant at patching the exploit until they knew it was too late and companies that we trust with our information should be more careful when dealing with it. For now, we have censored the last two digits of the phone numbers in order to minimize spam and abuse."
The database of user names and phone numbers was released through SnapchatDB, which is an unofficial and anonymous website, according to The Verge.
The SnapchatDB domain was offline as of Wednesday morning, featuring only this message: "This account has been suspended. Either the domain has been overused, or the reseller ran out of resources."
About a week ago, Australian security research group Gibson Security raised concerns about Snapchat's site, revealing details about a security hole that could be manipulated into leaking private information.
The area of concern was Snapchat's Find Friends feature, which lets users upload their address book to the site to find accounts with numbers that match.
"Theoretically, if someone were able to upload a huge set of phone numbers, like every number in an area code, or every possible number in the U.S., they could create a database of the results and match usernames to phone numbers that way," Snapchat said in a blog post responding to the research group.
"Over the past year we've implemented various safeguards to make it more difficult to do. We recently added additional counter-measures and continue to make improvements to combat spam and abuse."
Snapchat's leak is especially disturbing in light of the target audience for the message-sharing service, which sends text and photo messages that disappear after 10 seconds or less. The app is reportedly popular with tweens and teenagers.
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