“The Snappening” is upon us. Sorry, kids, it wasn’t just a hoax after all. And the massive hack is just as terrible, horrible, no good and very bad as cyber thugs warned it would be.
As initially confirmed by , hackers did indeed release a glut of explicit Snapchat images and videos over the weekend. Cyberthieves stole approximately 90,000 photos and 9,000 videos from the ephemeral photo mobile messaging app (and, let’s be real, the known “sexting” tool). They pulled the cyber burglary off by breaching a third-party Snapchat client called SnapSaved.
Much of the leaked content, about 13 gigabytes of stolen material mainly from European Snapchatters, is reportedly tantamount to child pornography, as around half of Snapchat’s users are between the ages of 13 and 17.
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Earlier this year, on New Year’s Day, anonymous hackers leaked the names and phone numbers of 4.6 million Snapchat users.
Snapchat says it’s not responsible for this latest leak, which The Daily Beast today dubbed “the biggest leak of personal photos ever.” The Pacific Palisades, Calif.-based startup maintains that “no Snaps” were snagged from its servers and that it routinely warns users against using third-party apps that could jeopardize their privacy.
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“We can confirm that Snapchat’s servers were never breached and were not the source of these leaks,” Snapchat said in a statement. “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.”
Meanwhile, in equally depressing hacking developments, news broke this weekend that Dairy Queen and Kmart customer payment systems were breached in separate incidents. Basically, nothing digital is sacred -- or safe -- anymore.
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