SnapSaved Responds To Hacking

After we learned about SnapChat photos numbering in the hundreds of thousands had been leaked to the internet by hackers, we were quick to cover the issue as well as publish our very own guide to keeping your pictures safe on the internet.

SnapChat themselves weren’t to blame for the issue – the images were taken from a third party website called SnapSaved, a service which saves people’s SnapChats if they opt into the process.

After SnapChat made sure their reputation wasn’t further tarnished by the debacle by letting everyone know it was SnapSaved’s fault. Now SnapSaved themselves have spoken out in response to the community’s outrage at their security problem.

Additionally, their statement also covered some of the additional accusations that they themselves were either behind the leak or were involved in gradual funneling of people’s private images to hackers. Apparently these accusations aren’t true, according to SnapSaved’s statement.

“I would like to elaborate on the recent events regarding Snapsaved.com
Snapsaved.com Was a website used to save SnapChat’s, precisely as the app snapsave.
In response to recent media events and the statement made by http://pastebin.com/cJcTbNz8, I would like to inform the public that snapsaved.com was hacked, the dictionary index the poster is referring to, was never publicly available. We had a misconfiguration in our Apache server.
SnapChat has not been hacked, and these images do not originate from their database.
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.
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 500MB of images, and 0 personal information
From the database.
The recent rumors about the snappening are a hoax. 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.
The majority of our users are Swedish, Norwegian and American.
I sincerely apologize on the behalf of snapsaved.com we never wished for this to happen. We did not wish to cause SnapChat or their users any harm, we only wished to provide a unique service.”

The pastebin article linked allegedly comes from somebody responsible for the hacking, although it’s impossible to confirm who or where the post came from. However, the message from the poster to “never send explicit images of yourself over a medium which you do not directly control” is probably the most important part of the message.

Snaphack — A conspiracy theory that the hackers are actually ghosts has not yet materialized.

SnapSaved’s response to the claim in the Pastebin post that the images were freely available is not the case, according to the site. Apparently a hole in their security caused by a ‘misconfiguration in their Apache server’ was to blame. For those wondering, an Apache server is a type of web server, a computer with a boot device or other disk containing a web site.

The misconfiguration apparently allowed hackers to enter their server’s storage medium and access the images. It’s not yet clear who was responsible for the hack, or who was affected.

However, it’s interesting to note the reactions to the debacle across the internet, as well as in the mainstream media, where SnapSaved themselves are not even mentioned in some publications and headlines claim that all the photos were explicit.

Source: SnapSaved on Facebook

Via: TechCrunch