As per the recent reports, a slide of nude pictures started showing up on 4chan last night. These images were actually hitched from thousands of Snapchat users.
The event has been hailed as ‘The Snappening’, dubbed after the former nude hacked photo named ‘The Fappening’. About a month ago, some hackers got hacked some celebrities’ iCloud accounts, stole nude pictures from there and posted them on 4chan. One of the notable actresses among all was Jennifer Lawrence, who said that this is a ‘Sex Crime’.
Kenny Withers (social media consultant & writer) stated that, “Hackers stole pictures from 200,000 accounts.”
Snapchat has issued the following statement to VentureBeat in response, confirming that a hack has occurred. But Snapchat makes clear that its “servers were never violated”.
“We can validate that the Snapchat servers were never violated and were not possibly the source of these leaks. Probably Snapchatters were mistreated by their 3rd party apps, which they probably use to send and receive photos, a practice that we always prohibit in our Terms of Use, as they compromise on the customer’s security. We anxiously scrutinized the App Store and Google Play for illegitimate third-party apps and have succeeded in getting many of these removed.”
The images leaked on Thursday night might be saved from years, although there is some confusion about the source of the images. There are some reports stating that these images came from a 3rd party client SnapSave. Though, Business Insider reported that these images came from SnapSaved Website, which allow users to save their pictures online instead of mobile.
The statement of the Snapchat confirms that the hack has indeed occurred, but they pushed all responsibility to the user – which is something the victims of this hack aren’t likely to appreciate.
