But Gibson Security, a group of anonymous hackers from Australia, has published a new report with detailed coding that they say shows how a vulnerability can be exploited to reveal phone numbers of users, as well as their privacy settings.
“Snapchat has a feature where it will grab all the numbers from your address book, upload them to their server [which is pretty bad by itself] and suggests you friends,” a spokesman for Gibson Security told Guardian Australia.
“We discovered that if you were to go through and scan single phone number through this find friends function you could essentially obtain the phone number of a Snapchat user.”
The group says they approached Snapchat almost four months ago to flag the vulnerability, but never received a response, so they decided to release the full details of their findings on Christmas Day