Snapchat employee data leaks out in phishing attack but user data is safe!

Snapchat has fallen victim to a phishing scam where in the company employees’ data has been compromised. Reportedly, a payroll department employee at the company emailed sensitive personal information about 700 current and former workers to someone pretending to be Chief Executive Evan Spiegel.

A report by LA Times stated that the hoaxer has received sensitive employee information such as W-2 tax form data, including name, Social Security number, wages, stock-option gains and benefits. Currently, the FBI is investigating the incident.

It must be pointed out that user data was not compromised and company servers were neither breached. Snapchat stated in a statement that, “We’re just impossibly sorry.” In addition, the company says that we confirmed that the phishing attack was an isolated incident and reported it to the FBI and we began sorting through which employees–current and past–may have been affected." Snapchat is also offering two years of free identity-theft insurance and monitoring to the affected victims.

In addition, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel has reportedly disclosed that that the app’s users watch 8 billion videos a day, which puts this service just behind that of Facebook, which recently also reached 8 billion daily video views in November last year.

A report by Re/Code  states that Snapchat boasts 100 million daily users, compared to Facebook’s user base of more than a billion daily active users. CEO Evan Spiegel spoke with bankers and analysts at the Morgan Stanley’s Tech, Media & Telecom conference in San Francisco and said that the company’s 100 million-plus daily users are spending an average of 30 minutes inside the app every day. Basically, more than half of the new users signing up to Snapchat these days are over the age of 25 respectively.