More than 100,000 Snapchat photos and videos were leaked online on 4chan forum last week after a third-party Snapchat client was hit by a major privacy breach.
On Sunday around 13 gigabytes of the hacked Snapchat content were posted on 4chan in an event called “The Snappening”.
Normally, pictures and videos sent through Snapchat are self-destructive and get deleted in a matter of seconds, but some of the apps like SnapSaved.com lets users store the photos and videos sent from the messaging application on a web server without the sender knowing.
Snapsaved.com on Monday admitted that its servers had been breached by hackers resulting in some 500 megabytes of photographs being compromised.
“I would like to inform the public that Snapsaved.com was hacked,” Snapsaved wrote in a Facebook post. “We had a misconfiguration in our Apache server.”
“Snapchat has not been hacked, and these images do not originate from their database. As far as we can tell, the breach has affected 500MB of images, and 0 personal information from the database”.
The third-party Snapchat client said on its Facebook page that it deleted its entire website and database as soon as it realized that it had been hacked. The website was down on Monday.
In a statement released last week, Snapchat tried to distance itself from the controversy claiming that that its servers “were never breached and were not the source of these leaks”.
The company added: “Snapchatters were victimised 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.
“We vigilantly monitor the App Store and Google Play for illegal third-party apps and have succeeded in getting many of these removed.”
