The image-based bulletin board 4chan has claimed that the popular application Snapchat has been hacked, resulting in many personal photos leaked.
Snapchat is a photo-sharing application that has grown in popularity due to its ability for a user to send a photo, only to have the photo be erased just seconds after it is opened. The purpose is so the Snapchat receiver can see the photo for those quick seconds, and Snapchat prevents potentially embarrassing photos from being shared. If the Snapchat receiver of the photo attempts to get a screenshot of the image, then the Snapchat sender is automatically informed. Many of these temporary Snapchat photos are nude images or of some explicit nature and 4chan users are claiming that these types of Snapchat photos are going to be released online in a searchable database.
Snapchat responded to this claim from 4chan with this quote to Engadget, a popular tech and gadget site: "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."
One third-party application that has the ability to send and receive Snapc hat photos is Snapsave, and many 4chan users believe that this application was the one that was hacked. These 4chan posts claim that Snapsave's cloud storage database contains over 200,000 images, and that this database full of potentially explicit images will be available to Internet users as early as October 12th.
A Snapsave representative named Georgie Casey has stated that Snapsave doesn't run on a cloud setup, saying "Our app had nothing to do with it and we've never logged username/passwords".
The potential incident with Snapchat photos being leaked to Internet users has often been referred to as "The Snappening". This is a similar name to a similar situation that is happening with Google, as certain leaked photos of nude celebrities have also leaked onto the Internet. The Google situation has been dubbed "The Fappening", which is an Internet term for masturbation. Both of these incidents have led users of cloud services to wonder how safe their data is to hacks, and how private their photos truly are.
