If you thought your pictures on snapchat were 100 percent safe, think again. Hackers leaked thousands of pictures online without breaching snapchat's server. How was this done? According to The Daily Beast, a group of snaps were posted online to a fake website, viralpop.com. After users downloaded the snaps, it was deleted and the files were shared on 4Chan.
This leak has been named "The Snappening" and is being discussed on many threads on the image board of 4Chan. Snapchat's spokesperson stands firm on its comment that no photos have been leaked from their servers.
Recently, photo hacking has been going on and celebrity photos were leaked prior to "The Snappening". This Snapchat hack shifted attention to third party apps that allow Snapchat addressees to save the "temporary" pictures.
Searching Google Play and Apple's app store expose many third party apps that promise to save snapchat pictures and videos without the sender's knowledge. This undermines Snapchat's user agreement and dirties the trust Snapchat is trying to rebuild.
Related: 4chan Claims 100,000 Snapchat Photos Has Been Hacked
A Snapchat spokesperson said, "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," They went on to say, "We vigilantly monitor the App Store and Google Play for illegal third-party apps and have succeeded in getting dozens of these removed."
In May of this year, Snapchat settled with the Federal Trade Commission over claims it deceived the users about the "disappearing messages". In their privacy policy, Snapchat claimed it temporarily collects, processes and stores the secrete message sent over its servers, and promises to delete the content automatically as soon as it is viewed by one or more of its recipients.
In a Reddit thread, SnapSave.com, was mentioned as a possible source of the Snapchat leak and since then has been taken offline.
A disclaimer posted on Snapchat's website adds that "we cannot and do not represent or warrant that the services will always be secure or error-free or that the services will always function without delays, disruptions or imperfections." Robert Siciliano, a McAfee online security expert, said Snapchat users should not have a reasonable expectation that their snaps will remain private.
"The mere fact that apps exist that have essentially reverse engineered Snapchat API means that the technology is vulnerable," Siciliano said. "Additionally anyone that understands the very basics of how [a] mobile phone works recognizes a simple screenshot, it captures any photo forever"
