Wellington, Feb. 15 : A 23-year-old PHD student has reportedly said that it took him only half and hour to crack SnapChat's latest security measures.

Steven Hickson , who is studying Computer Science at Georgia Tech, and has briefly worked at the NSA in Maryland, said that it was a 'no brainer' to crack the photo-sharing service's icon identifying puzzle.

According to stuff. co. nz, SnapChat had implement the latest security feature after it admitted that white-hat hackers had breached its user database that exposed millions of usernames and phone numbers exposed to criminals.

SnapChat's latest security update, dubbed 'Snap-tcha,' required the user to identify the company's ghost icon in a series of nine drawings, something only humans and not bots supposedly could do.

However, it did not take Hickson much time to use Microsoft's Kinect device to locate the ghost images.

The report added that apart from Hickson, a high school sophomore from Texas similarly bypassed the Snap-tcha puzzle. (ANI)