On Tuesday anonymous hackers used a known security flaw in the Snapchat photo messaging app to access data on 4.6 million users, including names and phone numbers. The hackers then posted a copy of the data on a site called SnapchatDB.info
Category: That’s Interesting
The Minneapolis Star Tribune posted an article today that Target Corp. has suffered a security breach that could put millions of customer credit cards at risk. A spokeswoman from American Express has confirmed the breach, and it appears that security expert Brian Krebs first reported the issue on December 13th.
forecast.io has an interesting blog post about their Dark Sky forecasting system and the process they use to remove noise (such as ground clutter) from radar images. Here’s an image showing the system in action:
Not entirely accurate, but very cool research paper and visualizations showing global internet usage as seen by a botnet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carna_botnet
If you use last.fm, eHarmony or LinkedIn I highly recommend changing your passwords and preferably using a different password for these sites and others. These 3 sites aren’t alone. Sony, Zappos, Microsoft, Twitter and many other major brands have reported their own security breaches and compromised data.
UPDATE: FormSpring has just announced today (7/10/12) that their site has suffered a similar security breach, and that they will be disabling some 30 million affected user accounts.