Thousands of Snapchat users have had their photos compromised, and a collection of nude snaps—including photos of underage users have been leaked to 4chan and elsewhere.
The hack has been acknowledged by Snapchat today, although Snapchat wouldn’t say how many users were affected.
The company was quick to deny any responsibility for the leak.
According to statement released by Snapchat to VentureBeat, The company confirms that their servers were never breached and were not the source of these leaks. Snapchatters were victimized 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.
The entire premise of Snapchat is that snaps are automatically deleted after viewing, but there are dozens of ways to save copies of the photos before they self-destruct. In this case, hackers apparently found a weakness in a third-party web version of Snapchat web called Snapsaved (not to be confused with the popular Snapsave Android app) and used it to collect 13 gigs of private photos. There are supposedly 200,000 snaps in all, although it’s not yet clear how many of them are nudes.
The site originally hosting the files is now offline, according to Business Insider, but 4chan users have downloaded copies and are working on re-uploading them and making them searchable by Snapchat username.
It hasn’t been confirmed that the leak contains child pornography, but Snapchat says half of its users are young teens.
Source: Gawker
