March 1, 2016
In a blog post on Sunday, Snapchat executives revealed that the payroll data of some current and former employees was exposed as the result of a scam e-mail sent to a human resources employee at the company.
“The good news is that our servers were not breached, and our users’ data was totally unaffected by this,” a company spokesperson said in the post. “The bad news is that a number of our employees have now had their identity compromised. And for that, we’re just impossibly sorry.”
On February 26, an employee in Snapchat’s payroll department received a “spear phishing” e-mail that appeared to be from Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel – but that came from an external e-mail address. The message requested employee payroll information. The individual targeted didn’t recognize the message as a scam, and they forwarded the requested information.