Snapchat 'smoothie hack' spams users with images of fruity drinks

Snapchat’s bad luck this year is still not coming to an end. After multiple instances of the service being hacked, it now has to deal with spam. Users are reporting receiving images of fruity drinks along with scammy website URLs on their Snapchat accounts.   Wired Editor Joe Brown reported that he started receiving text messages from friends asking if he had deliberately sent out images of smoothies along with links of a website in the caption. He then realised that his Snapchat account had been hacked and was sending out seemingly innocuous pictures of smoothie drinks.   People who are also on **Instagram** along with Snapchat will realise that this is an encore of a hack attack that affected the photo sharing service last year. Users’ home pages were being flooded by pictures of smoothies and fruits, recommending followers to take up a healthy diet along with the poster. Of course, this was followed by a link that could maliciously attack your account when clicked on.   Snapchat has said that it is aware of these messages that have been making the rounds on its service since the past few days. “Yesterday a small number of our users experienced a spam incident where unwanted photos were sent from their accounts. Our security team deployed additional measures to secure accounts. We recommend using unique and strong passwords to prevent abuse,” Snapchat said in a statement regarding the hack. It did not mention how many people were being affected by it.   The year started off on a sour note for Snapchat when hackers made public millions of its user data like username and partial phone numbers. The hackers claimed that they had done so only because Snapchat had not been taking reports about flaws in its security seriously. Of course, the hack had the desired effect and Snapchat tried to **fix the hole** in its Find Friends feature.   Unfortunately, last week too it was revealed that there was a security issue with Snapchat that could let hackers freeze and reset iPhones by sending a barrage of messages to a user within seconds. The **DoS attack** finally reached Snapchat’s ears and it looks like the service is cleaning up its act to shed the tag of being a security failure.