Around 200,000 private Snapchat images have been hacked, it has been revealed.
The ephemeral app, which allows users to take photos and send them to their friends before they’re “permanently” deleted (in reality other users can screenshot those images, thus keeping them stored on their devices forever), has had the privacy of its users breached to the hacking of third-party app SnapSave and website SnapSaved.com. This hacking has been dubbed “The Snappening” by users, similar to “The Fappening” scandal that saw leaked images of celebrities from Jennifer Lawrence to Kaley Cuoco being shared online.
SnapSave is an app that allows users to save Snapchat images, with website SnapSaved offering an almost identical service. The two are unconnected, though both have had their servers breached leading to hundreds of thousands of Snapchat photos being obtained, with images of children reportedly being among those that have been compromised.
Speaking of the hacking, Snapsaved.com issued a statement on its Facebook page, reading:” I would like to inform the public that snapsaved.com was hacked, the dictionary index the poster is referring to, was never publicly available. We had a misconfiguration in our Apache server. SnapChat has not been hacked, and these images do not originate from their database.
“Snapsaved has always tried to fight child pornography, we have even gone as far, as to reporting some of our users to the Swedish and Norwegian authorities. As soon as we discovered the breach in our systems, we immediately deleted the entire website and the database associated with it.
“As far as we can tell, the breach has effected 500MB of images, and 0 personal information from the database.”
Hacker: “I will not be leaking any content from Snapsaved or Snapchat.”
An individual claiming to be the hacker also released a statement, saying: “I wish to begin this release with the following: I WILL NOT BE LEAKING ANY CONTENT FROM SNAPSAVED OR SNAPCHAT. Normally I would apologize to people I have misled, but in this case, I have decided against doing so.
“The content that has been released over the last 48 hours is an invasion of personal privacy. I do not condone this action or any like it. I understand the want and need for this content by what seems like a large section of the Internet. Normally, I am completely for the freedom of information and the free flow of content through the Internet; however, this “snappening” will aid no one and hurt us in the end.”
Speaking of his/her decision to hack the servers of the third-party site/app, the hacker said: “I wish to apologize to anyone that was affected by these happenings. It was not my intention to pervert your personal property.
“I hope if anything this will bring attention and awareness to the fact that you should, if at all possible, never send explicit images of yourself over a medium which you do not directly control. In short, I will NOT be leaking any content today, tomorrow, or ever. I wish for these images and videos to remain private for the benefit of both the Internet and of personal privacy. I wish you all the best and please think before you post.”
You can see the full list of users who have been hacked right here.
