Snapchat hackers release 100,000 videos and photographs including explicit images of children

 
Hacked: Snapchat said the breach only affected people using a third party app
Rashid Razaq13 October 2014

More than 100,000 videos and photographs - potentially including explicit images of teenageers and children - have been leaked online by hackers targeting users of the Snapchat mobile messaging service.

Dubbed “The Snappening” the trove of personal files were apparently released by the same group who published nude images of celebrities including actress Jennifer Lawrence in a security breach of Apple’s iCloud labelled “The Fappening.”

Around half of Snapchat’s 4.6 million users are aged between 13 and 17 meaning any naked or explicit pictures would be deemed child pornography and anyone downloading the files liable to prosecution.

Anonymous posts on the bulletin board 4chan on Friday warned that as many as 200,000 could be released and yesterday 13 gigabytes of content, claimed to have been captured from Snapchat users, was made available online.

The mobile phone chat service allows people to send private photos to people in the belief they will be automatically deleted a few seconds after being viewed and can not be saved.

However the hackers are believed to have targeted a third party app Snap Save which allows users of Snapchat to access their images on a desktop computer rather than just on a mobile phone.

In a discussion forum on the Reddit website, internet users who have accessed the images complained that many of the them were “mundane” selfies and pictures of pets and scenery however there are nude images with no way of verifying the age of the people in them.

Snapchat denied responsibility for the leak and issued a statement that said: “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.”

The leak is not the first to affect Snapchat users. In January this year the usernames and phone numbers of 4.6 million accounts were hacked and briefly posted online.

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