Just because you’re not a celebrity, doesn’t mean your private photos are safe. The image bulletin board 4chan leaked hacked photos belonging to Snapchat users, half of which are underage. The 13GB worth of media include over 200,000 photos and videos.
The hack has been dubbed “The Snappening” a play on “The Fappening,” which was the name given to the scandal involving hacked celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton.
As with the previous hack it even has its own website: TheSnappening.org. It’s mostly innocuous videos of day-to-day life that have to be clicked through one at a time but that could change. A searchable database that would allow searches by Snapchat username is reportedly in the works.
The hack was done through third-party apps like SnapSave and now the defunct SnapSaved, which allow pictures and videos to be saved without notification to the sender as Snapchat does. However, SnapSave insists their service saves video to phones not the cloud.
“We can confirm that Snapchat’s servers were never breached and were not the source of these leaks,” Snapchat said in a statement. “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. We vigilantly monitor the App Store and Google Play for illegal third-party apps and have succeeded in getting many of these removed.”
Unfortunately, not even the Snapchat ghost emoji was immune to this sex crime:
