Up to 200,000 images and videos from the photo messaging app Snapchat were apparently nabbed by the same hackers behind the massive celebrity nude link. Many of the pictures posted online may depict compromising images of teenagers.
The content captured after some users opted to use a third-party website called SnapSaved.com, which lets users save incoming messages after handing over their login details to the site. This allowed them to keep photos sent via the mobile app which otherwise would have been deleted within 1-10 seconds and later access them on desktop computers.
By handing over their passwords, however, SnapSaved.com was given access to Snapchat’s servers, where the content was culled. After permanently saving the photos to its own servers, SnapSaved ended up being hacked.
Due to the technical specificities, many users believed that it was Snapchat itself that was a hacked, a claim Snapchat developers and SnapSaved itself denied.
SnapSaved first made the world aware their servers had been hacked in a Facebook post on Saturday, stressing Snapchat was never compromised.
“As soon as we discovered the breach in our systems, we immediately deleted the entire website and the database associated with it,” SnapSaved said in a statement.
“As far as we can tell, the breach has affected 500MB of images, and 0 personal information from the database.”
On Friday, however, a message on the bulletin board 4chan said that a site with up to 13 gigabytes of stolen content would go live on Sunday.
The hackers also claimed that the images had been indexed, which would have allowed hackers to access all of a person’s messages by entering their username.
SnapSaved immediately denied the hackers had the sophistication to pull off that feat.
“The recent rumors about the snappening are a hoax. The hacker does not have sufficient information to live up to his claims of creating a searchable Database,” SnapSaved said.
Snappening is a play on the portmanteau fappening, used by Reddit users to describe the massive celebrity nude photo leak last month.
The word combines the M. Night Shyamalan film titled ‘The Happening’ with the word fapping – internet slang for masturbation.
The FBI and Apple are currently investigating that hacking.
