When last year, Snapchat turned down Facebook's $3 billion offer to buy the company out, it became the talk of the town and somehow it surely knows how to stay in the headlines but this time the reason behind it being in the headlines is not totally Snapchat's fault.

On late New Year's eve, an anonymous group of hackers posted up to 4.6 million Snapchat users' usernames and phone numbers accounts on a website called SnapchatDB.info, which wanted to send the company a message.

"Our motivation behind the release was to raise the public awareness around the issue, and also put public pressure on Snapchat to get this exploit fixed. It is understandable that tech start-ups have limited resources but security and privacy should not be a secondary goal. Security matters as much as user experience does," the hackers told The Verge.

The hackers used a modified version of Gibsonsec's exploit/method, and claimed Snapchat could have avoided this "by replying to Gibsonsec’s private communications, yet they didn't. Even long after that disclosure, Snapchat was reluctant to taking the necessary steps to secure user data. Once we started scraping on a large scale, they decided to implement very minor obstacles, which were still far from enough. Even now the exploit persists. It is still possible to scrape this data on a large scale. Their latest changes are still not too hard to circumvent."

Since, the day when the hack happened was a holiday Snapchat wasn't too slow to respond and confirmed the hack and also announced that it would soon release a new version of the app and will permit its users to opt out of the "Find Friend" feature (the feature that was exploited by the hackers) after they have verified their phone number.

"We’re also improving rate limiting and other restrictions to address future attempts to abuse our service," Snapchat also shared in a blog post.

Though the company is yet to comment on hack.

Now talking about SnapchatDB.info -

If you visit this website you'll notice it clearly states -

This database contains username and phone number pairs of a vast majority of the Snapchat users. This information was acquired through the recently patched Snapchat exploit and is being shared with the public to raise awareness on the issue. 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.

This proves that either the folks at Snapchat were too arrogant to take the possible-exploit situation too seriously or they just don't care. Well, the hackers were at least decent enough that they censored the last two digits of each number so as to "minimize spam and abuse." But the sad part here is that the uncensored data is available on request and according to the hackers "security researchers from around the world, professors from various universities, private investigators and attorneys," are already requesting this data.

After this hack one thing is sure that not only the Snapchat users but people who use other-related services would think twice before sharing their personal information on such applications. What if someday another such hack happens and all your personal details like credit card no. or other information is out in the public? Leave us your thoughts about this hack in the comment section below.

Stay tuned and updated with E-junkie.