Do you or a member of your family frequently use Snapchat to share private, intimate photos? If so, I hope you won’t be relying on them remaining private.
Because, as has been known for some time, there will always be ways for Snapchat images to be preserved by recipients – even if you were hoping they would expire and delete themselves a few seconds after being viewed.
Now, in a situation known as “the Snappening,” hackers were able to gain access to the servers of a website called SnapSaved.com. This is one of a number of third-party services that have historically permitted Snapchat users to secretly save the images they have been sent. So, if you have ever exposed your private parts to someone on Snapchat – there is a chance that your picture is now in the hands of hackers. Worse still, the images are allegedly linked to specific usernames – meaning that you might have even more embarrassment to look forward to.
Additionally, it may be worse than red faces. Many of the users of Snapchat are likely to be under the age of consent, and if they have taken intimate photographs of themselves it could technically qualify as child pornography – a point addressed in one 4Chan post.
On its Facebook page, SnapSaved.com posted a statement:
I would like to inform the general public that snapsaved.com was hacked and that the dictionary index referred to by the poster was never made available to the general public. We had a misconfiguration in our Apache server. Snapchat has not been hacked, and these images do not originate from their database.
Snapsaved has always tried to fight child pornography, we have even gone as far, as to reporting some of our users to the Swedish and Norwegian authorities. We immediately deleted the entire website and its database as soon as we discovered the breach in our systems. We know that the breach only affected 500MB of images and deleted no personal data from the database. In an official statement given to the press, Snapchat washed its hands of any responsibility:
“We can confirm that Snapchat’s servers were never breached and were not the source of these leaks. Users of Snapchat were harmed because they used third-party apps to send and receive Snaps, which we explicitly prohibit in our Terms of Service because they compromise the security of our users. We vigilantly monitor the App Store and Google Play for illegal third-party apps and have succeeded in getting many of these removed.”
To an extent you can sympathise with Snapchat’s viewpoint. They weren’t hacked, and they weren’t guilty of sloppy security (on this occasion at least, but don’t forget that Snapchat usernames and phone numbers have been exposed in the past…).
But more clearly needs to be done to remind Snapchat’s millions of users – many of whom are teenagers – of the dangers of sending intimate images that may later leave them humiliated or embarrassed if shared with unauthorised parties.
I suspect that many of Snapchat’s users have been lulled into a false sense of security, imagining that it is safe to share intimate images via the app and believing the marketing propaganda that suggests images will be safely erased forever within ten seconds.
At the time of writing, SnapSaved.com is inaccessible. Personally, I’d be quite happy for it to stay that way – and if Snapchat itself were to suffer a similar demise, I for one wouldn’t shed any tears.
200,000 naked Snapchat images leaked, after third-party hack
