Feb 29, 2016 @ 10:55 AM
Hacker Pretends To Be Evan Spiegel To Steal Snapchat Employee Data
Thomas Fox-Brewster
Forbes Staff
CEO and co-founder of Snapchat Evan Spiegel (Photo by Larry Busacca/Getty Images for Time Inc)
Snapchat has fallen victim to a CEO impersonation attack, in which a hacker used an email pretending to be the messaging company’s chief Evan Spiegel to acquire data on current and former employees.
The company said in a brief post it was embarrassed by Friday’s incident, in which the payroll department was sent an email by someone convincingly masquerading as Spiegel. They asked for payroll information, which they duly received, though the company has not confirmed how many were affected or what exact data was lost.
“Payroll information about some current and former employees was disclosed externally. To be perfectly clear though: None of our internal systems were breached, and no user information was accessed,” the post read.
“We responded swiftly and aggressively. Within four hours of this incident, we confirmed that the phishing attack was an isolated incident and reported it to the FBI. We began sorting through which employees–current and past–may have been affected.”
The affected employees have been offered two years free identity-theft insurance. Snapchat promised to “redouble” its efforts in preventing such attacks.
Impersonating Spiegel may have been made easier by the Sony Pictures leak of 2014, as his contact information was published by the hackers, as well as some of his personal emails with Sony execs.
