The popular Snapchat application has fallen victim to hacking as anonymous, so far, hackers managed to gain unauthorized access to the mapping software of the company "Mapbox", with which Snapchat collaborates as well as other well-known applications.
The hackers, after exploiting a vulnerability they discovered in the mapping data, proceeded with the racist renaming of New York to «Jewtropolis», that is «City of the Jews».
In a statement, Snap, the company behind Snapchat, called this move an act of «vandalism» and «extremely offensive» while also assuring that together with its partners from «Mapbox» they worked quickly to promptly fix the issue.
Mapbox condemned the incident and called it “hate speech.” It also stressed that the issue was resolved “within an hour” as its technicians removed the name given to the city by the hackers , while stating that further attempts were made to rename cities by the criminals, but were not successful. The company then explained that it receives more than 7,000 changes to its map software every day, which its technicians process, and concludes that the racist renaming of New York is partly due to “human error.”
Images from users on social networks confirm that other applications were also affected by hackers. Snap« thanked publicly the user who highlighted the hacking as it communicated directly with Snapchat's support team on Twitter. Following communication with news agencies, it emphasized that «this vandalism on the app's maps is extremely offensive and contradicts our values. We would like to apologize to all community members who saw it».
