More than four-and-a-half million Snapchat usernames and phone numbers leaked online Tuesday after anonymous hackers posted the information on a website called SnapchatDB.info, the group confirmed to Mashable Wednesday.

The database of information was available to download as an SQL dump or CSV file via SnapchatDB.info, which is currently suspended. View a cached version of the site, [url=https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JXVE3rtXZcAJ:[url]www.snapchatdb.info/+&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca]SnapchatDB[/url]

"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 hackers behind SnapchatDB used a recently published Snapchat API exploit to access the photo-messaging app's usernames and phone numbers.

"Our motivation behind the release was to raise the public awareness around the issue, and also put public pressure on Snapchat to get this exploit fixed. It is understandable that tech startups have limited resources but security and privacy should not be a secondary goal. Security matters as much as user experience does," the hackers told Mashable via Bitmessage.

"We hope to see that Snapchat patches the exploit, and patches it well this time...Especially after seeing the magnitude of attention that our leak received, we think that Snapchat will be targeted by other groups if they don't safeguard user security. We expect Snapchat to roll out a proper patch and notify their users and assure them that they will be more careful with their private information from now on."

On the site, the SnapchatDB hackers said they censored the last two digits of users' phone numbers "in order to minimize spam and abuse," but that they may agree to release their uncensored database "under certain circumstances." The hackers told Mashable that they chose to suspend the site because their hosting provider was "overwhelmed" by traffic from the public, and don't intend to put it back up again. They also said they have the uncensored Snapchat database "stored in multiple locations." Mirrors and torrents of the database are now widely available online. Gibson Security, Australia-based white-hat hackers, published Snapchat's API and two exploits last week, according to ZDNet. The SnapchatDB hackers then used a "modified version" of a Gibson Security exploit for its late-Tuesday leak.

Snapchat addressed the Australian group's disclosure in a short blog post published last Friday.

"Theoretically, if someone were able to upload a huge set of phone numbers, like every number in an area code, or every possible number in the U.S., they could create a database of the results and match usernames to phone numbers that way. Over the past year we’ve implemented various safeguards to make it more difficult to do. We recently added additional counter-measures and continue to make improvements to combat spam and abuse," the company said.

The SnapchatDB hackers said Snapchat's reluctance to take "the necessary steps to secure user data" compelled the hackers to take action, according to their statement.

Gibson Security told Mashable on Wednesday that it was not involved in SnapchatDB's leak.

"As much as we were hoping that it wouldn't come about, we felt that something like this was inevitable — Snapchat may have invoked it with their recent blog post about how they had fixed the exploit and that the entire thing was a nonissue."