Another hacker has publicly bested Snapchat's security features.

A blog post published Wednesday shows how developer Steven Hickson was able to bypass Snapchat's most recent security feature, which attempts to protect the service against bot accounts.

The feature was included in Snapchat's most recent app update, and requires new users to identify pictures that contain the company's ghost logo out of a collection of images.

See also: The Six Stages of Snapchat

The extra step was meant to work as a human verification system so that malicious software could not create new accounts automatically. But Hickson claims he was able to write a program to identify the ghost images automatically — in around 30 minutes.













Snapchat's new human verification system was hacked in around 30 minutes.









Hickson, whose LinkedIn profile identifies him as a graduate research assistant at Georgia Tech focused on computer vision and robotics, broadcasted his methods on his blog Wednesday. Basically, Hickson took an image of Snapchat's logo, then built a program that can identify certain points on the logo and match them to the images in the test.

"With very little effort, my code was able to "find the ghost" in the above example with 100% accuracy," Hickson wrote. "I'm not saying it is perfect, far from it. I'm just saying that if it takes someone less than an hour to train a computer to break an example of your human verification system, you are doing something wrong."













Hickson's code identified specific points on Snapchat's logo and compared them to the security images.





Image:

Image: Steven Hickson







The security hack suggests another misstep for Snapchat, which dealt with a more severe hack earlier this year when 4.6 million accounts and phone numbers were leaked online. That hack occurred after a security firm had warned Snapchat about the potential for a security breach.

Hickson included the hack code on Github. His blog was another message to the company that it needs to beef up security.

In a statement to Mashable, a Snapchat spokesperson responded: "We continue to make significant progress in our efforts to secure Snapchat. For security reasons, we cannot provide detailed information on security countermeasures."