Snapchat has had a rough start to 2014 with a New Year’s hacking and then an unrelated spam fest, but it’s been making strides to make sure the rest of the year goes a lot smoother. To that end, it has just added a new verification feature to its popular disappearing-photo-sharing application.
Snaptcha requires registering users to find the Snapchat logo in pictures
In a nutshell, the feature requires users to find the Snapchat “ghost” logo when they intitially register for a new account (existing users, of course, shouldn’t notice any change). Users will be prompted with “Just making sure you’re not a robot. Select all images containing a ghost.” during registration, at which point they’ll have the choice of nine images to choose from, some of which include the Snapchat logo while others contain similar-looking images that are meant to throw off computerized registrations.
This new form of registration was confirmed to TechCrunch by Snapchat with a brief statement:
“We appreciate the efforts of those who help identify vulnerabilities in our service and we continue to make significant progress in our efforts to secure Snapchat.”
These improvements should go a long way in helping to secure Snapchat against any new threats, and most of the existing threats are being looked into from what we’ve been told. It’s a good bet that as the year progresses, we should see even more holes filled in Snapchat’s security.