Hackers have reportedly obtained photos and videos from Snapchat and are claiming that they will leak the photos in an online database on Sunday night, Oct. 12.
The hack is being dubbed the Snappening and it reportedly involves a massive 13 GB library of photos and videos, which will be released in a database that involves usernames.
While Snapchats privacy policy does say that it could be possible to retrieve photos in some cases after they have been deleted, that doesn't take away from the trust that users put in the service.
In reality, however, it is not Snapchat that is in question in the case. While the exact app that was used has not been disclosed, there are a number of third-party Snapchat apps that could be the culprits.
SnapSave and the similarly named SnapSaved are services that allow users to view photos outside of Snapchat. It appears as though both services create backups of Snapchat messages, potentially allowing hackers to find and take advantage of those backups. It is unclear as to whether or not the backups are created intentionally or simply as part of how the apps work.
Snapchat itself is putting the blame on users who use these third-party apps.
"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," said the company in a statement. "What we do know is that our servers have not been breached and no Snaps have been leaked from our servers,"
Despite this, many are saying that Snapchat appears to not be monitoring such apps very closely and that the service has historically not taken security as seriously as they should have.
"SnapSave was in the [Google Play Store] since 2013. That alone suggests to me that they're [Snapchat] not being very aggressive," said Chris Eng in a statement. "I would bet that they've never had an independent security review."
The scandal follows a similar leak that happened at the beginning of September involving hundreds of female celebrities getting their iCloud accounts hacked and nude photos from those accounts leaked online.
While celebrities were able to use their power to threaten companies like Google for linking to hacked photos, Snapchat users generally don't have the same power and will likely not even know if their photos have been leaked.
