200,000 hacked Snapchat photos could be leaked

Hundreds of thousands of Snapchat users’ private images may be leaked to the internet over the weekend following an alleged hack on an image database which saves user Snapchats.

It is not yet clear which image saving-service was reportedly hacked, but both services are not directly associated with Snapchat.

The first suspected victim is a now-unavailable Android app called Snapsave, and the second is a website called Snapsaved.com.

Both of these services allow recipients of Snapchats to secretly save them for later viewing.

There are currently multiple threads on the image-board 4chan which are discussing the hack, now being dubbed the ‘Snappening’ in relation to last month’s nude celebrity photo leak.

Snapchat told CBR: "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."

Earlier this week a 4Chan user claimed to have hacked into Snapsave, and pinched over 200,000 images. The anonymous user then posted a screenshot of some images as proof.

Images from the hack are set to be released on October 12, but some users have cast doubts on the hacking claims. These users argue that the images posted as proof from the original hacker can also be found form a different source. However, the hacker claims that the images will be uploaded in the form of a searchable database, meaning that photos can be tracked to a user’s Snapchat ID.

The hacker claims that the pictures will be uploaded to a searchable database, meaning that images can be traced back to the victims’ Snapchat user IDs.

This is not the first time Snapchat users have come under attack. At the beginning of this year, hackers leaked the usernames and phone numbers of about 4.6 million accounts and also posted them online temporarily.

The data was made available for download by a website dubbed SnapchatDB.info, in the wake of a warning of vulnerabilities in Snapchat’s app by an Australian firm, Gibson Security.