Messaging boards on the notorious website 4chan have been filling up with news of the imminent leak, already being referred to as “The Snappening.”.The personal image that are believed to be sent through Snapchat — the ephemeral messaging service that allows users to send pictures that should disappear after a few seconds — has been floating on the image based 4chan’s notorious /b/ board since last night. The incident was result of a security breach in an unofficial third-party app for Snapchat.
Hackers have warned that thousands of nude images sent via the mobile-messaging service Snapchat, many of which users believed self-destructed after being sent, are to be released online in a searchable database.
Hackers have warned that thousands of nude images sent via the mobile-messaging service Snapchat, many of which users believed self-destructed after being sent, are to be released online in a searchable database.
It comes just weeks after hundreds of celebrity nudes were leaked online through the same site, following a hack of Apple’s iCloud that has come to be referred to as the Fappening.Earlier this week an anonymous 4chan user claimed to have hacked into Snapsave, an image-saving service that allows users of Snapchat to store pictures received before they self-destruct.
But Snapchat has denied that its service was ever compromised. Earlier today, Snapchat issued a statement about the “Snappening” and blamed its consumers for using unofficial and unauthorized third-party apps.
“We can confirm that Snapchat’s servers were never breached and were not the source of these leaks,’ a Snapchat representative said in a statement. “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.”
Snapchat was first hacked in December 2013 when 4.6 million Snapchat users were exposed in a database breach. Later, the denial-of-service attack and CAPTCHA Security bypass vulnerabilities were discovered by the researchers at the beginning of this year.