The Snappening is real. A third-party website called Snapsaved.com has stepped out and taken responsibility for the leak of several thousands of photos and videos that were sent through the ephemeral messaging app Snapchat.
Snapsaved.com is no longer available but it has a Facebook page where the website's administrator posted a public apology to Snapchat users whose photos and videos, which were supposed to vanish into thin air moments after being sent, were leaked online due to a "misconfiguration" in the website's Apache server.
"I would like to inform the public that Snapsaved.com was hacked; the dictionary index the poster is referring to was never publicly available," says Snapsaved.com's administrator.
Snapsaved.com is a website that lets users use Snapchat on a website or a desktop application, not just on their mobile phones. However, the website appears to be saving users' Snapchat logins and storing their photos and videos without the senders knowing about it.
Snapsaved.com's apology comes after a Pastebin post by someone who was threatening to publish private photos and videos taken with Snapchat and saved on Snapsaved.com, saying that he changed his mind because it would be "an invasion of personal privacy." The poster says Snapsaved.com made the contents of its server freely available to everyone on the Internet by posting it on an un-indexed website for everyone to download.
Just hours before the Pastebin post was published, 13 GB worth of files, or nearly 98,000 images and videos apparently from Snapchat users were posted on torrent downloading website Pirate Bay.
But Snapsaved.com says the Snappening is a hoax and that the hacker who broke into the website's server "does not have sufficient information to live up to his claims." Snapsaved.com says 500 MB of data and "zero personal information" is affected by the breach. The website also says it has "always tried to fight child pornography," even going as far as contacting the Swedish and German authorities to report some of its users. Majority of Snapsaved.com users come from Sweden, Germany and the United States.
With half of Snapchat users comprising 13 to 17-year-olds, the database likely contains images that could be considered child pornography. Snapsaved.com says it exerted effort into "cleansing" its collection of inappropriate images as often as possible, suggesting that the administrator manually went through the photos to remove racy images and videos of users under 18 years old. Moderators on Reddit and 4chan, where links to the leaked photos abound, are actively working to delete all links posted on their websites.
Some users who said they downloaded the photos say they were disappointed over the lack of nudity in the collection. One user says the collection was mostly "selfies, memes, pets, scenery, etc., you know, typical stuff you'd expect to see in a conversation between normal people." Other users, however, called for other people to stop spreading the images.
"I deleted it as soon as I saw how much CP (child pornography) there is on it," says one Reddit user. "Don't be a part of the Snappening, don't seed it, don't share it, just get rid of it."
The leak was first reported by social media strategist Kenny Withers on Oct. 10. Snapchat has quickly responded to the issue, saying that its servers were fully secure and any images and videos of Snapchat users were leaked through the use of third-party apps, which Snapchat explicitly bans in its terms of use.
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
