(MyFoxBoston.com) -- Over 100,000 Snapchat photos and videos have been collected by a third-party Snapchat client app, allowing hackers to get into a 13GB library of Snapchats users thought they deleted.
There's a large database of Snapchat photos and videos, including underage nude images, that was released by hackers. It turns out that they had been taking the photos for years, according to Business Insider. Underground photo-sharing chat rooms were popular over the last week hinting, that this may happen and it did on Thursday.
Users of the chat forum 4chan say this is worse than the recent iCloud hacks and have dubbed this incident "The Snappening." They downloaded the files and are working on a searchable database so Snapchat users can search for their stolen images with their username.
The database of stolen files was posted to viralpop.com, which is a fake, rival website that will install bad software on the computers of those who are participating. The site was taken offline, but thousands had the chance to download the collection of Snapchat images first, which Business Insider reported includes underage, nude photos.
In a statement to Engadget, the Snapsave developer said that his app was not to blame, that it never logged usernames or passwords and that it does not store photos online, meaning that the hacked Snapchat client was likely a website, not an app, according Business Insider.
An anonymous photo trader reported to Business Insider that the site affected was SnapSaved.com, which acted as a web client for the Snapchat app. The site was gone a few months ago and the URL will send you to a Danish e-commerce site and a lot of the images had Danish messages.
4chan users say SnapSaved was behind this, but whether it was created for intercepting images is unclear.
Snapchat released a statement to Business Insider, saying that there sites were not breached and that they were not the source of the leaks.
The statement went on to say: "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."
The collection of photos had a lot of child pornography and videos sent between teens that they thought were deleted immediately. About half of Snapchat users are teens.
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Cox Media Group
