SnapChat, an app which allows you to send images and videos to your friends which have a set expiration date for deletion, has no real dedicated archive service. Indeed, one of the reasons people sue the app is because their images are not saved and don’t permanently exist. Cue a raft of naughty photos.
A recent hacking attack may have caused some SnapChat users to think twice about the safety of the app. Some users signed up their SnapChat account to third-party archiving site SnapSaved.com, which lets users register for the site to save the images and videos they create and/or receive with the service.
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We’re not 100% clear on exactly how SnapSaved works, as the website has been down following the attack, but what we do know right now that over 200,000 photos were ripped off from the third party service’s servers, some allegedly of a sexual nature with subjects who are underage. Not good at all.
This means that even if you don’t use the site, someone who has received photos of you could have saved them with SnapSaved, and hackers in turn may have made off with pictures of you. It’s not really much comfort that the hacking hasn’t affected every SnapChat user, since there’s no way to confirm which users use SnapSaved.
The photos have been circulating the internet, including web forum 4chan, where some users are claiming to be involved with the attack, although there’s no evidence to support this claim, or that 4chan as a whole were involved. Indeed, the media has a penchant for blaming ‘the 4chan menace’ fully or in part for most of these hacking attacks. Convenient scapegoat or internet menace? You decide.
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We must stress that SnapChat themselves are blameless in this fiasco. Those responsible are the hackers themselves, as well as third party app SnapSaved, who indeed have been accused of making off with the images themselves or siphoning them off to dodgy image peddlers since they started.
There hasn’t been any more information relevant to the issue released by either SnapChat or SnapSaved as of yet. All we know is that for now the images are being circulated online, and the SnapSaved is down. We hope you or nobody you know has been effected.
Check our freshly released guide on keeping your images safe here.
Source: Business Insider
Via: Techspot