Thousands of Snapchat pictures were stolen and posted online by hackers
About 200.000 pictures and videos sent by Snapchat users may have been hacked and stolen. People claiming credit for the theft say they’ll soon post the pictures online and 4chan users have already dubbed it “the Snappening”. Thumbnails were posted on 4chan as proof of this hack, but there is really no further evidence that it actually happened. In any case, security experts are treating this as credible and it seems like there will be consequences for the people who stole and posted them. Apparently the pictures have PG-13 rating and given Snapchat’s demographic we can only assume that the pictures are of underage people. This means that the ones who uploaded these pictures might end up facing charges of child pornography, if they can be identified of course.
It’s important to note that this wasn’t a hack of the Snapchat systems, but rather a hack of a third-party service that recipients of Snapchat pictures could use to save those pictures for repeated viewing. The service in question goes by the name of Snapsave and there is reportedly a second service similarly named as well. As for the creators of Snapchat, the company denied that its servers were breached and confirmed that the leak comes via the third-party service. “We can confirm that Snapchat’s servers were never breached and were not the source of these leaks,” a spokeswoman for the company said.
She also added that “Snapchatters were allegedly victimised by their use of third-party apps to send and receive Snaps, a practice that we expressly prohibit in our terms of use precisely because they compromise our users’ security.We vigilantly monitor the App Store and Google Play for illegal third-party apps and have succeeded in getting many of these removed.” We’ll let you know as soon as we learn anything else so stay tuned.