Scammer Gains Access to Snapchat Payroll Data After Posing as CEO
The malicious email claimed to come from CEO Evan Spiegel, and someone in Snapchat's payroll department fell for it.
By James Cook •
This story originally appeared on Business Insider
Snapchat has admitted in a blog post that one of its employees fell victim to an email scam that revealed payroll information about employees to people outside of the company.
The post says that "a number of our employees have now had their identity compromised" due to the phishing scam.
A phishing scam is where an email impersonates someone else in an attempt to get information about a company or login information to a system.
In this case, Snapchat says the malicious email claimed to come from CEO Evan Spiegel, and someone in Snapchat's payroll department fell for it.
Snapchat makes it clear in its blog post that no information about users was handed out -- it was only data about people inside the company. The company says that it reported the scam to the FBI and offered affected employees two years of free identity-theft insurance and monitoring.
This isn't the first time that tech companies have been hit by a phishing scam. Business Insider reported in August that many London startups had been targeted by phishing emails that impersonated company CEOs.
Snapchat was not immediately available to comment.
