Snapchat

Snapchat suffered a nasty surprise back in October when a third-party app that archived images and videos posted to the ephemeral messaging app suffered a security breach that allowed hackers to get their hands on masses of private Snapchat content.

It was a big embarrassment for the startup, even though its own servers were not hit in the attack. Since then, it’s been working on ways to make it more difficult for third-party apps to access its content, which include asking Apple and Google to remove offending software from their app stores.

Snapchat has long promised to make your online messages disappear. And now it can help make your money disappear, too.

On Monday, the mobile messaging company announced a partnership with payments startup Square, saying you can now use the Snapchat app to send money much as you would one its ephemeral text messages. The app now recognizes a dollar sign typed in to the messaging field and serves up a green button for sending the money from a connected debit card. Behind the scenes, Square will store the card’s number and handle the transaction.

This happened to me about an hour ago: I started getting texts from friends asking if I had intentionally snapped them photos of smoothies festooned with the URL of a scammy website. I had not.

Honest mistake; I get weird on Snapchat. But this smoothie was not mine, and I was not trying to sell discounted supplements through a fruit-themed scamsite; my Snapchat account was hacked, and I am not alone.

A cyber security researcher has discovered a vulnerability within the Snapchat mobile app that makes it possible for hackers to launch a denial-of-service attack that temporarily freezes a user's iPhone.

Jaime Sanchez, who works as a cyber-security consultant for Telefonica, a major telecommunications company in Spain, said he and another researcher found a weakness in Snapchat’s system that allows hackers to send thousands of messages to individual users in a matter of seconds. Sanchez said he and the fellow researcher discovered the glitch on their own time.

Photo messsaging service Snapchat hopes that an updated version of its popular app will put it on the path towards rebuidling customer trust after the data of 4.6 million of its users ended up online.

Late last week Snapchat published a blog post saying it would release an updated version of its popular app in order to remediate now heavily publicised issues with its Find Friends service, which lets users find other members using a phone number lookup method.