UPDATE: Thousands Of Hacked Snapchat Photos, Videos Leaked Online

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
UPDATE: October 13, 2014 (11:20 a.m.)
The hackers who late last week claimed to have hacked thousands of images and movies belonging to Snapchat users have apparently made good on threats to release them online, various media outlets reported on Monday.
According to Lance Whitney of CNET, some of the pictures and videos contain explicit content, and an unknown amount of them are images of underage subjects. Whitney noted that the hackers involved may have been the same ones responsible for posting nude photos of celebrities through the 4Chan online forum several weeks ago.
Likewise, USA Today and The Guardian have also reported that photographs and videos of as many as 200,000 users, some of them teenagers, have been leaked online by the hackers responsible for acquiring them through the third-party website Snapsaved.com.
Charles Arthur, technology editor for The Guardian explained that Snapsaved.com “offered to let them use the service on a website on a desktop computer, rather than just on a mobile phone,” but appeared to have been secretly recording “the users’ login details and storing the photos and videos that were posted.”
“Observers said that anyone downloading the files could be breaking child pornography laws if any of the pictures includes unclothed pictures of children under 16 even if the child took them,” Arthur continued, adding that one Reddit user had posted that nearly all of the 13 GB worth of media posted was “mundane” and “low resolution garbage,” and that there was just “maybe 100 MB of actual nudes” in photo or video form.
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ORIGINAL: October 11, 2014 (4:44 a.m.)
Thousands of photos and videos belonging to Snapchat users may have been stolen and may soon be leaked online, and the company is apparently blaming the breach on unauthorized third party apps.
According to Mike Snider of USA Today, at least 100,000 compromising images and movies were “in the process of being leaked” onto 4Chan, the same online forum where the first nude pictures of Jennifer Lawrence and other celebrities were posted.
The first photos and videos started being uploaded Thursday night, said VentureBeat’s Ruth Reader, and the hackers reportedly took the photos from 200,000 Snapchat accounts. The photo messaging service confirmed to Reader that a hack took place, but emphasized that its servers “were never breached.”
Instead, Snapchat told VentureBeat that users of the service 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 added that they “vigilantly monitor” both the Apple App Store and the Google Play marketplace for these third-party apps, and had already successfully had several of them removed.
Additionally, representatives from the company told Reuters that their statement regarding the hacked images was based solely on media reports of the incident, and that the company had not yet verified whether or not there actually had been a breach of any third-party software containing stolen Snapchat pictures or videos.
Ben Gilbert of Engadget reported that, as of approximately noon Eastern on Friday, no images had been leaked online – the only evidence of a hack was claims from anonymous 4Chan users claiming that the third-party Snapsave app had been hacked. Snapsave is third-party software which allows users to secretly save snaps.
“The posts allege that Snapsave uses cloud saving, and when it was breached, the cloud database was downloaded with approximately 200,000 images,” Gilbert said. However, Snapsave’s Georgie Casey said that his app had nothing to do with it, does not log usernames or passwords, and does not operate on a cloud-based setup.
James Cook of Business Insider reported that the service in question was not Snapsave but SnapSaved, a website that allowed Snapchat users to log in and save their images. SnapSaved “acted as a web client for the Snapchat app that allowed users to receive photos and videos, and save them online,” Cook said, adding users did not know that the website was “quietly collecting… incriminating Snapchats on a web server, with the usernames of senders attached.”
4Chan claims the image database is expected to be online by Sunday, Gilbert said, and since the images are allegedly linked to usernames, anyone’s photographs and videos could be among those that could be leaked. Cook added that the anonymous individual responsible is claiming to have access to a 13 GB collection of Snapchats.
In addition to the scandal of yet another collection of private, compromising photographs (potentially) being stolen and posted online, experts were also buzzing about Snapchat’s response to the incident. Mark James, a security specialist from ESET, told BBC News, “For them to just turn round and say, ‘It’s the users’ fault,’ does seem harsh. They give the perception it is safe, they need to make it safe.”
Similarly, security consultant Brian Honan told BBC technology reporter Dave Lee that the leak was troubling for Snapchat, especially since earlier this year 4.6 million usernames and phone numbers were released online, and that that service has also been experiencing an issue with spam messages being sent out from users’ account without their knowledge or consent.
“Has Snapchat been breached? According to the letter of the law, no,” Honan added. “But people use Snapchat to keep their information secure and would expect the company to have systems and services in place to support that.”
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