The 4chan website has created its share of noise over the past month, since the first wave of celebrity nude leak photos and then the ones that followed, featuring mostly female celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence and Hope Solo, though most recently also English actor Matt Smith, former Doctor Who star. However, the previous leak wasn't where the 4chan website drew the line: last weekend, the site also leaked over 200,000 Snapchat pictures of regular non-celebrity folk in an event dubbed The Snappening.
As the 4chan website is back on the business of disrupting people's privacy, for once it appears that the leak didn't happen because of a weak security system, as was the case of Apple's iCloud with previous photo leaks in the past month. After the leak of over 200,000 pictures on the 4chan website, spokespeople for Snapchat informed that the company's platform had had no hacking problems in regard of stolen pictures or anything of the sort - in fact, the users who'd had photos made public were victims of a security breach in third-party apps, which company Snapchat advises against.
Regarding the issue, the Snapchat people told website Engadget.com: "We can confirm that Snapchat's servers were never breached and were not the source of these leaks. 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."
Snapchat is popular precisely due to the apparent temporary nature of its content: after an image has been shared, it disappears only a few seconds later, and snapping a screen capture of the picture will notify the other user. However, this happens only in the official app, and others have been created to breach that policy - reportedly, the pictures that the 4chan website posted are from one of those side apps. A report by The Guardian says that the hacked app was Snapsaved.com.
According to the San Francisco CBS website, about 50% of Snapchat's user base is between the ages of 13 to 17, which means that some of the leaked content could actually be child pornography.
