Snapchat: Photos Hacked In ‘The Snappening’ After 3rd Party Breach
It looks like celebrities are not the only ones who are having their private pictures hacked! According to a new report, over one hundred thousand user images sent on Snapchat are currently being circulated on 4chan!
Uh-oh! According to a new report, members on 4chan are claiming to have access to hundreds of thousands of private pictures sent through Snapchat that have been saved to the site, Snapsaved — just weeks after numerous allegedly hacked nude photos of celebrities emerged in “The Fappening.”
Snapchat Hacked ‘The Snappening’ — Photos Saved On Snapsaved Allegedly Hacked
Another huge breach of privacy! According to The New York Times , the alleged hacked pictures are coming from Snapsaved which is described as, “a smartphone tool that its creators said would allow users to store photos from their Snapchat accounts that normally disappear after 10 seconds.”
The site reports that Snapsaved is not affiliated with Snapchat and its website, Snapsaved.com does not appear to be working.
It appears that the site was never available as an app and, “To install it, users would probably have had to go directly to the Snapsaved site — something Google strongly discourages because of security concerns,” The New York Times reports.
Do you think "The Snappening" is real?
Snapsaved is also different from the app, Snapsave. Georgie Casey, the creator of Snapsave said, “My app just saves Snaps to your Android phone, nothing is ever sent to my server.”
The creator also shared why he is sceptical of the site. “I came across it first around April 2014 and it had something like 100 Facebook likes,” Georgie said. “I assumed no users would be stupid enough to enter their log-ins on a random website, but your average Snapchat user isn’t very tech savvy.”
On Oct. 10, the site reports that a spokeswoman for Snapchat said, “We can confirm that Snapchat’s servers were never breached and were not the source of these leaks,” she said. “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 Snappening’ — Questions Answered
While there are still many questions to be answered, The Independent reports on what kinds of pictures are being circulated. The site reports that the comments on 4chan and reddit suggest that most of the picture are of, “normal every day activities; walking to school, showing off your new haircut or cooking a meal” with, “maybe 100MB of actual nudes.”
The site reports that most of Snapchat’s users are under the age of 18, so any type of nudity could be considered child pornography. The Independent says that there is another very scary aspect to this hack — that the images have been indexed. This means, “that hackers could simply punch in a username and then find all of that person’s messages.”
What do YOU think, HollywoodLifers? Do you think that apps need to increase their security? Let us know your thoughts below!
