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Snapchat employee falls prey to phishing scam, leaks payroll information

A Snapchat employee has fallen for a phishing scam and accidentally disclosed confidential payroll information to an outside party.

As part of what is believed to be an isolated incident, phishing emails were sent out to the Snapchat payroll department by someone claiming to be the Snapchat Chief Executive Officer, Evan Spiegel.

The email requested confidential payroll information and one employee obliged, not knowing they were responding to a scam email.

“The bad news is that a number of our employees have now had their identity compromised. And for that, we’re just impossibly sorry,” reads a blog post by the social platform.

As compensation, Snapchat is offering employees affected by the leak, two years of identity-theft insurance and monitoring at no cost to them.

Unlike a hack in 2014 when some 200 000 user photos were leaked, the platform has said that no user data was compromised and no internal systems were breached.

That said, the payroll information leaked could contain sensitive information including ID numbers, banking details and even physical addresses of the employees.

According to Snapchat all that can happen now is that it owns up to its mistake and learns from this incident. In light of this the firm will increase its training programes which centre around privacy and security in the coming weeks.

It just goes to show, anybody can fall victim to a phishing attack and you never know when you could get a mail from you “CEO” asking for some sensitive information.

Be careful out there folks.

[Source – Snapchat] [Image – CC BY/2.0 Maurizio Pesce]

 

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