Hackers are threatening to make hundreds of thousands of photos of regular people public, and some of them are nude photos. They come from the app Snapchat.
Hackers posting on the website 4Chan say they are going to post the private photos to the internet, possibly in a searchable database by username.
Snapchat says their servers were not breached. The leak came from other apps.
“All it takes is one bad apple and it’s something that’s so aversive and abrasive,” says James Swan, mobile tech specialist at Spartan Computers in York. “If you had to put credit card information in this thing, would you feel safe?”
Third-party apps like Snaphack and Snap Saver allow users to open the photos and videos and save them, looking at them over and over, without the sender even knowing it. Snapchat’s Terms of Use prohibits the use of these other apps, but they don’t enforce it.
And even more troubling, some of the images hacked could be coming from coming from kids. Snapchat’s Terms of Use says it’s intended for users age 13 and over. The leak could make Snapchat an unintentional facilitator of child pornography.