Temporary suspension of automatic snap registration following security incident

store
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On September 28, 2023, the Snap Store team was notified of a potential security incident. A number of snap users reported several recently published and potentially malicious snaps.

As a consequence of these reports, the Snap Store team has immediately taken down these snaps, and they can no longer be searched or installed.

Furthermore, the Snap Store team has placed a temporary manual review requirement on all new snap registrations, effectively immediately.

If you try to register a new snap while the requirement is active, you will be prompted to “request reserved name”. Upon a successful manual review from the Snap Store staff, the name will be registered. Uploading and releasing revisions for existing snaps will not be affected.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause our snap publishers and developers. However, we believe it is the most prudent action at this moment.

We want to thoroughly investigate this incident without introducing any noise into the system, and more importantly, we want to make sure our users have a safe and trusted experience with the Snap Store.

Please bear with us while we conduct our investigation. We will provide a more detailed update in the coming days.

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Any idea how long the review process can take? Thanks.

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Hi, a name review shouldn’t take more than one business day. (Your request has been approved.)

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Excellent, much appreciated.

Laurence LaGrange

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As we continue to investigate the security incident, we have decided to lift the restriction on new snap name registrations.

Instead, we will be conducting daily reviews of new snaps being uploaded. We will flag, investigate and take down any snap that looks suspicious.

We are taking this action to remove friction from the snap publishing experience, whilst still closely monitoring what is being uploaded on a regular basis.

We are discussing methods to prevent situations like these happening in future and provide a safe, trusted experience to our users. Thank you for your understanding and patience.

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Could you share how the investigation is going?

It has been some time since then and it would be interesting to understand how this could happen (if possible).