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Thousands Of Private Photos Possibly Leaked In Massive Snapchat Hack
Just over a month after hackers leaked the private photos of dozens of celebrities (including Jennifer Lawrence), the slimy denizens from the dark corners of the Internet have come back with an even larger hack of potentially up to 200,000 Snapchat users' private photos.
In a hack known as "The Snappening" (the last celeb photo leak was nicknamed "The Fappening"), almost 13 gigabytes of Snapchat photos have allegedly surfaced on 4chan Thursday night. Although the Venice-based app automatically deletes photos and videos sent through their system after they've been viewed, it appears as if the photos were obtained by hacking third-party apps that store Snapchat pics and videos. According to Business Insider, the compromised sites are possibly the Android app Snapsave or SnapSaved.com
On Thursday, SnapChat tweeted that their own servers were not hacked and that third-party apps (which violate their terms of use) were to blame:
We can confirm that Snapchat’s servers were never breached and were not the source of these leaks.
— Snapchat (@Snapchat) October 10, 2014
Snapchatters were victimized by their use of third-party apps to send and receive Snaps, a practice that we expressly prohibit in our ToU.
— Snapchat (@Snapchat) October 10, 2014
Snapsave has told Engadget that their service was not the source of the leak. SnapSaved.com now no longer exists as the Snapchat pic-saving service but instead redirects to another site. According to users on 4chan, the entire collection of photos will be posted on Sunday.
SnapChat is popular among its users for sexting, among other uses, because the photos are automatically deleted once they are sent. As one would reasonably deduct from its popularity among teenagers, "The Snappening" is bound to contain an massive amount of child pornography. This isn't the first high-profile breach of SnapChat users' privacy. On New Year's Eve of last year 4.6 million users had their phone numbers published, which prompted the service to beef up their security.
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