SnapChat Users Hacked – No one knows who’s to blame

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Hackers are holding users of the popular photo-sharing app – Snapchat – hostage after a database of an image-saving-service with no affiliation to SnapChat was hacked. Hackers are not stopping there either. “the hackers have claimed on 4chan that they will make hundreds of thousands of Snapchat users’ private images and videos available in a searchable database, according to GigaOM

SnapChat, which has taken the nation by storm by letting users send self-destructing pictures. The beauty of the app is that it doesn’t allow you to save picutres. Even if you take a screenshot of the pic through your phone, the other user is notified. Some people use this as a strict form of text messaging. I don’t know why, but they do. To each their own.

Confsusion all around

Everyone is pointing the finger at somebody else. Some people are speculating that the hack derived from the image-saving service, SnapSave, an Android app on the GooglePlay Store (don’t try downloading it, it’s already been removed). Business Insider reported earlier that the hack came from SnapSaved.com, a site no longer in service.

Oh 4Chan

Courtesy of GigaOM

So the hackers made truth to their claim by posting 200,000 images on website called Viralpop. Unfortunately for the hackers, the site was suspended by the host hours later. Allegedly, you could search for images by searching for a users SnapChat ID.

SnapChat Strikes back

We can confirm that Snapchat’s servers were never breached and were not the source of these leaks.

— Snapchat (@Snapchat) October 10, 2014

Snapchatters were victimized by their use of third-party apps to send and receive Snaps, a practice that we expressly prohibit in our ToU.

— Snapchat (@Snapchat) October 10, 2014

When I reached out to Snapchat, a company spokesperson provided KnowTechie with this statement:

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 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.

Kevin Raposo

Kevin is KnowTechie's founder and executive editor. With over 15 years of blogging experience in the tech industry, Kevin has transformed what was once a passion project into a full-blown tech news publication. Shoot him an email at kevin@knowtechie.com or find him on Mastodon or Post.