Snapchat Vulnerability Can Lead to iPhone Denial-of-Service Attacks
A vulnerability in the Snapchat app opens the iPhone up to denial-of-service attacks that can cause the device to freeze and crash, according to cyber security researcher Jamie Sanchez [Google Translation] (via The Los Angeles Times).
A weakness in the app’s system can allow a hacker to send thousands of messages to a Snapchat user in seconds, which can cause a crash that requires a hard reset to fix. Tokens generated by the app used to verify user identity can be reused by hackers to send a flood of messages.
By reusing old tokens, hackers can send massive amounts of messages using powerful computers. This method could be used by spammers to send messages in mass quantities to numerous users, or it could be used to launch a cyber attack on specific individuals, [Sanchez] said.
Sanchez demonstrated the flaw for The Los Angeles Times, sending a reporter 1,000 messages within five seconds in a denial-of-service attack, which caused the reporter's iPhone to freeze until it restarted.
The security researcher declined to contact Snapchat with his findings as he believes the startup "has no respect for the cyber security research community" after ignoring previous app vulnerability reports.
Snapchat has faced multiple problems as its private messaging app has grown in popularity, including vulnerabilities that allowed users to bypass screenshot notifications and a recent security breach that compromised the user names and phone numbers of more than 4.6 million customers, which Snapchat was warned about ahead of time by a security group.
When asked about this particular vulnerability, Snapchat said it was unaware of the problem but interested in learning more.
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Top Rated Comments
okay, let's do this
FB already offer $3B for it and was spurned.
As for snapchat, it's useful to share quick pictures to everyone, make a "story" (a collection of many pictures, funny in parties!), send random stupid faces, doesn't require cell to be used (only wifi) thus is usable on ipods or with plans with low data, doesn't require to give your phone number, received/read notification, and is quicker to send than sms/mms across all devices.
It's quite easy to get someone's snapchat nickname (for instance using FB/twitter) and you can then crash their device whenever you want to piss them off. Any teen with some knowledge in dev can simply google the API (leaked on reddit some time ago) and have fun, and I suppose there'll be tools very soon to do it with no knwloedge at all.
Finally, while some cyber community groups are making viruses and all, some of them simply work on security to improve softwares.