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Hacker Posts Snapchat Source Code To GitHub (thenextweb.com) 49

tacarat shares a report from The Next Web with the caption, "Oops": A GitHub with the handle i5xx, believed to be from the village of Tando Bago in Pakistan's southeastern Sindh province, created a GitHub repository called Source-Snapchat. At the time of writing, the repo has been removed by GitHub following a DMCA request from Snap Inc, so we can't take a closer look and see what it contains. That said, there are a few clues to its contents. The repository has a description of "Source Code for SnapChat," and is written in Apple's Objective-C programming language. This strongly suggests that the repo contained part or whole of the company's iOS application, although there's no way we can know for certain. It could just as easily be a minor component to the service, or a separate project from the company.

The most fascinating part of this saga is that the leak doesn't appear to be malicious, but rather comes from a researcher who found something, but wasn't able to communicate his findings to the company. According to several posts on a Twitter account believed to belong to i5xx, the researcher tried to contact SnapChat, but was unsuccessful. "The problem we tried to communicate with you but did not succeed In that we decided [sic] Deploy source code," wrote i5xx. The account also threatened to re-upload the source code. "I will post it again until you reply :)," he said.
A Snap spokesperson said in a statement: "An iOS update in May exposed a small amount of our source code and we were able to identify the mistake and rectify it immediately. We discovered that some of this code had been posted online and it has been subsequently removed. This did not compromise our application and had no impact on our community."

According to Motherboard, some researchers appear to be trading the data privately.
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Hacker Posts Snapchat Source Code To GitHub

Comments Filter:
  • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday August 07, 2018 @07:19PM (#57088836)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by nadass ( 3963991 )
      That was already forked from a repo last updated 3 months ago from https://github.com/4jy/Source-... [github.com]
    • by Anonymous Coward

      Hey, uh, Snapchat folks, if you're reading this, you might want to look up the Streisand Effect. I never would have come across your source code if you hadn't tried to hide it. See, that's not how the Internet works. Once it's out, it's out. Horse bolted, barn burnt to the ground, gone.

      There's no use latching the ashes together.

    • Not much source code in there. It's certainly not the code for the whole app.
  • How does an app update expose source code? I can't even think of a mechanism that could make that happen, unless your developers are purposely inept. More likely scenario is that someone inside shared the code with his buddies and it leaked out. Either way, still some serious problems with configuration control there.

  • The pictures don't get deleted and are stored for permanent recall.

    Who else believes that the government is looking out for our best interests, all modern examples of communism aren't the right kind of communism, and social media does its best to weigh both liberal and conservative voices? /sarcasm

    • This was proven years ago when a bunch of pictures were leaked from their servers.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Does this mean Snapchat could become a usable protocol or possibly even a standard someday?

    • hi middle aged millenial. the current young generation all use snapchat via unofficial clients already. just like you used Trillian in the 90s and couldn't belived middle-aged people at the time used both icq and msn official clients.

  • by SlaveToTheGrind ( 546262 ) on Tuesday August 07, 2018 @08:20PM (#57089120)

    Yeah, if the world suddenly discovered there were only a few thousand LOCs behind my $16B market cap, I'd probably try to save face too.

    • Pretty sure the iOS client application source is pretty small compared to the backend source.

      Not saying anything about market caps and justifications of course.

    • The codebase of Snapchat may be worth a couple of million. 16 billion in value is mostly the millions of young people who spend there time on it.

  • by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday August 07, 2018 @09:15PM (#57089320)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by someone1234 ( 830754 ) on Wednesday August 08, 2018 @03:16AM (#57090192)

    "The most fascinating part of this saga is that the leak doesn't appear to be malicious, "

    Yeah, he basically says this: pay up or i will publish your source code. Not malicious at all.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Now people will be able to send photos to each other

  • Wow, that is very serious that posted the source code snapchat. I have a question, and can take this source code to do something like this? Or they get caught on the fact that they have no rights?
    • Let's say that if you plan to come up with a snapchat clone based on their code the chances are slim of becoming rich with it.
  • Why wouldn't hackers respect the moral value of this high volume porn conduit ?

    How could such upstanding people, such as hackers, commit this impropriety to this wonderous app?

    Clearly we are not spending enough on education, redistribution schemes, and Keynsian dirt relocation ...

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