Pierluigi Paganini
October 11, 2014
The Fappening is considered my mass media one of most interesting case of privacy violation, four archives containing a numerous celebrities nude photos have been released in the last weeks … and many experts sustain that the disclosure is still non ended.
A new privacy scandal is crowding the page of many websites, tens of thousands of private photographs and videos of common people are circulating over the Internet.
This time the pictures seems to have a different origin, experts believe that the personal photos were stolen from Snapchat application, for this reason the new case is dubbed The Snappening.
The popular messaging service that allows users to send pictures that should disappear after a few seconds, under the name The Snappening someone has leaked on the 4chan service the images of common people.
The data breach was caused by an alleged violation in an unofficial third-party app for Snapchat. Earlier this week an anonymous 4chan member claimed to have obtained picturs on Snapchat and warned of releasing thousands of nude videos and images sent using the popular image messaging service in an event dubbed ‘The Snappening’.
Immediately the security experts speculated on the possible causes of the incident, someone hypothesized that SnapChat app servers were compromised in a hack that resulted in the leakage of a database of 13GB private Snapchat files.
Today Snapchat issued an official statement about the “Snappening” and blamed its mobile users for using unofficial and unauthorized third-party apps.
“We can confirm that Snapchat’s servers were never breached and were not the source of these leaks,’ a Snapchat representative said in a statement. “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.”
The experts believe that data was obtained from a website called SnapSaved.com that is an external app used by a numerous of Snapchat, the application is used to save Snapchat photos without the sender knowing.
The Business Insider has blamed the SnapSaved.com, a site which is no longer active, and the SnapSave app as potential sources of the leak.
“We don’t know whether the third-party Snapchat client, whether Snapsave or SnapSaved, was created with the purpose of intercepting images. It may have been the case that hackers accessed the servers of one of the sites, which had inadvertently stored the files, and rehosted the directory online.” reports the Business Insider.
We must also consider that Snapchat service was already hacked in the past, in December 2013 4.6 million usernames and numbers exposed and publicly available on a specifically created domain SnapchatDB.info.
It has been estimated that nearly 200,000 Snapchat accounts were breached, the most concerning thing of the Snappening case is that Snapchat’s user base consists largely of teenagers, the disclosure of their naked photos could have serious repercussions, an let me remind my readers that collect the these leaked photos is considerable a child pornography crime.
You can bet we will see in many of these cases in the future!
(Security Affairs – Snapchat, Snappening)
