First it was "The Fappening," now it's "The Snappening." Over the last several months some of Hollywood's hottest female stars had fallen victim to a massive hack that dumped hundreds of private - mostly nude - photos online.
The hack, which targeted celebs such as Rihanna, Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton, was dubbed "The Fappening." Now, Snapchat users are facing a very similar scandal after thousands of photos and videos were leaked.
According to The Daily Beast, 90,000 private images and 9,000 videos from Snapchat users have surfaced online in what is being called "The Snappening." Reportedly, a 13.6 GB file containing the Snapchat images and videos was posted to viralpop.com, a fake website.
The site was quickly deleted but not before thousands of people downloaded the file and then shared the stolen content on other sites like Reddit and 4chan. At first it was rumored that the Snapchat leak was an internet hoax, but The Daily Beast claims it is very real and mostly targets users that live in Europe.
Unlike "The Fappening," which went after mostly female celebrities, "The Snappening" has leaked images of both male and female users. The Daily Beast reports that much of the leaked content is explicit. Snapchat has already released a statement denying that its servers were breached. Instead, it blames a third-party app named SnapSaved.
"We can confirm that Snapchat's servers were never breached and were not the source of the 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."
SnapSaved.com allowed users to save videos and pictures sent to them. However, the illegal app was secretly storing the content, along with personal information, to a website. SnapSaved has since been deleted and no longer exists.
According to Snapchat, about half of their users are between the ages of 13 and 17, which makes the leak a child pornography case.
