Snapsaved has admitted there was a breach of its servers, but it hasn't changed its stance on asserting the 13-GB leak of images stolen from Snapchat users is anything more than a hoax.
In what's become known as the Snappening, hackers claimed they breached Snapsaved servers and have been siphoning off images of Snapchat users. Snapchat is an ephemeral message app that's popular with teenagers and Snapsaved is a third-party app use to store media from the former indefinitely.
"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," a Snapchat spokesperson said. "We vigilantly monitor the App Store and Google Play for illegal third-party apps and have succeeded in getting dozens of these removed."
Though Snapchat has washed its hands of the issue and Snapsaved has downplayed it, Robert Siciliano, a McAfee online security expert, pointed out the longstanding vulnerabilities in the messaging app, weaknesses that have been exploited in the past.
"The mere fact that apps exist that have essentially reverse-engineered [the] Snapchat API means that the technology is vulnerable," Siciliano said. "Additionally, anyone that understands the very basics of how [a] mobile phone works recognizes a simple screenshot, it captures any photo forever."
With half of Snapchat's users said to range between 13 and 17 in age, the leak of hundreds of thousands of images, some of which may be explicit, has drawn a high level of scrutiny to all players surrounding the alleged leak. Before the Oct. 12 leak of the images that were allegedly stolen from Snapsaved.com, Snapsaved, however, dismissed the Snappening as a hoax.
"The recent rumors about the Snappening are a hoax," said Snapsaved. "The hacker does not have sufficient information to live up to his claims of creating a searchable database. Our users had to consent to all the content they received via SnapSaved.com, as we mentioned. We tried to cleanse the database of inappropriate images as often as possible."
Snapsaved admitted that a misconfiguration of its databases lead to a vulnerability, which opened the door to a subsequent breach. The site has denied being active or complicit in the breach and the alleged leak of the images.
"Snapsaved has always tried to fight child pornography, we have even gone as far as to reporting some of our users to the Swedish and Norwegian authorities," said Snapsaved. "As soon as we discovered the breach in our systems, we immediately deleted the entire website and the database associated with it. As far as we can tell, the breach has effected 500 MB of images, and of personal information from the database."
