File this one under ‘Shit That Feels Inevitable But Is Still Pretty Terrible All The Same’ – various media outlets are reporting that overnight, hundreds of thousands of leaked Snapchat images were dumped online, in an event that has, of course, come to be known as ‘The Snappening’.
Leaked Snaps are hardly anything new, however, the scale of this particular event is worrying. The Sydney Morning Herald report that a 13GB file consisting of hundreds of thousands of pictures and videos – consisting largely of nudes and explicit content that users presumed they were sharing privately – was posted anonymously on a malware-distributing site.
Reportedly, a number of 4Chan users jumped on the images, which have been collected over a number of years, and began archiving them, in order to create a database, which will be searchable by Snapchat username.
Snapchat have weighed in already, saying that the leak was not a security flaw on their behalf, but rather, the result of third party apps that target users. “We can confirm that Snapchat’s servers were never breached and were not the source of these leaks,” the company said in a statement overnight.
“Snapchatters were victimised 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.”
Various third party apps exist to capture Snaps, including SnapSave – it is not known which, but it is reported that at least one such app had its database hacked, leading to the leak of around 200,000 images and videos. As the bulk of Snapchat users are teenagers, it is safe to say that a fair percentage of the leak would constitute child pornography.
Jennifer Lawrence spoke out against celebrity nude leak The Fappening earlier this week, labeling the violation of privacy a “sex crime.” We’ll be following this latest story as it develops.
