The Fappening may be over but the Snappening has just begun. Hackers stole thousands of nude Snapchat photos over the weekend and they are now leaking them on the forum 4Chan.
According to USA Today, as many as 200,000 photos may have been stolen.
Snapchat confirmed that thousands of its users were victimized by the attack but added that the company’s servers were never breached. The majority of the photos were taken from a third party Snapchat client.
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
Users on 4Chan claimed that the third party app Snap Save was hacked but developer Georgie Casey said that his app had nothing to do with the security breach.
Casey said: “Our app had nothing to do with it and we’ve never logged username/passwords.”
According to Business Insider, it’s more likely that the images came from the website Snapsaved.com. The third party Snapchat client allowed users to save photos and videos, which would have otherwise been deleted, on its online servers. Snapsaved also kept track of usernames which means that the hackers can now create a searchable database.
Snapsaved.com went offline several months ago. Some people are speculating that the website wasn’t actually hacked. Instead, the theory is that the website was designed specifically to steal photos.
Regardless of how it was done, the fact of the matter is that more than 100,000 private photos will soon be made public. To make matters worse, Snapchat has a very young userbase (half of Snapchat’s users are between the ages of 13 and 17) which means that the database probably contains thousands of child pornography images.
0 Comments