Snapchat, the popular phone messaging app developed by Stanford University students, has pledge to fix its Find Friends feature following a security breach made by hackers that put personal information of its users on public.

In a statement, the company said:

"We will be releasing an updated version of the Snapchat application that will allow Snapchatters to opt out of appearing in Find Friends after they have verified their phone number. We're also improving rate limiting and other restrictions to address future attempts to abuse our service.

We want to make sure that security experts can get ahold of us when they discover new ways to abuse our service so that we can respond quickly to address those concerns. The best way to let us know about security vulnerabilities is by emailing us: security@snapchat.com."

On  January 1, Snapchat users panicked after learning that at least 4.6 million snapchat usernames and phone numbers were posted by the still unidentified hackers on a website called SnapchatDB.info.

"You are downloading 4.6 million users' phone number information, along with their usernames. People tend to use the same username around the web so you can use this information to find phone number information associated with Facebook and Twitter accounts, or simply to figure out the phone numbers of people you wish to get in touch with," the site said.

The perpetrators said that what they did was to "raise the public awareness around the issue, and also put public pressure on Snapchat to get this exploit fixed," adding that it's not an excuse to put people's info at risk if you're only a start-up company.

SnapchatDB hackers censored the last two digits of users' phone numbers to lessen spam and abuse, but threatened to release such private information "under certain circumstances."

In Snapchat's official statement, there was no sign saying they were apologetic about the incident but insisted that they are "dedicated to preventing abuse."