4Chan is at it again: photos sent from roughly 2,000 Snapchat accounts were stolen and posted onto the image - sharing website on Friday, Venture Beat has reported.
Snapchat is an app that allows users to send photos to friends that disappear after a maximum of 10 seconds. The company has issued a statement confirming the hack happened, but denying that it happened through their servers. Instead, Snapchat says the photos were stolen through third - party apps.
"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," the statement said, as reported by Venture Beat.
Though the photos automatically delete in Snapchat, hackers have found ways to latch onto them. This time, they found a loophole in Snapsaved, a third - party version of Snapchat, and utilized it to collect 13 gigs worth of intimate photos. It is not clear how many of the 20,000 seized photos show naked users, Gawker reported.
Angered users not that this is a bigger hack than the iCloud leak that led to nude photos of celebrities being posted online. The photos that users thought were long gone had been collected for years by a third - party user, according to Business Insider. Users of 4Chan are setting up a way to search the photo database by username.
An anonymous tipster has said that SnapSaved.com was affected. It acted as web client for Snapchat that let users save the photos and videos they received to an online server. Unbeknownst to Snapchat users, the web client was saving everything it received and attaching usernames to the photos.
