The "Snappening" Leak: 13GB of Photos From 200,000 Accounts

The Snappening Leak - 3GB of Photos

After the recent storm of iCloud leaks involving Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton and many other celebrities, comes a new wave of leaked nude photos. This time around, the victims are users of a popular photo messaging service Snapchat. The database was announced on the infamous forum 4chan and contains over 13GB of photos from over 200,000 accounts.

What makes this leak different, however, is the way the these photos were obtained: they were intercepted using a third party service, such as Snapsave (no longer available on Google Play) or Snapsaved (website down). Whether these snap-saving services were designed to intentionally collect user photos or their servers were hacked is unclear.

Snapchat representative confirms the leak at engadget.com:

“We can confirm that Snapchat’s servers were never breached and were not the source of these leaks. 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.”

What’s the lesson to be learned from this? 

Use the official apps.

UPDATE: Snapsave representative Georgie Casey replied to the allegations, saying that “Our app had nothing to do with it and we’ve never logged username/passwords.”