Hackers Leak 13GB Of Snapchat Images

Up to 13 gigabytes’ worth of personal videos and pictures of Snapchat users have reportedly been leaked online, after hackers apparently compromised third-party services used to access the service.

It isn’t yet clear which third-party service or services were involved, but around 200,000 accounts are believed to have been affected by the leak, many of whom are likely to be teenagers, since half of Snapchat’s user base is between 13 and 17. The leak reportedly includes explicit images.

Snapchat, which allows users to transmit images that disappear quickly, usually after a few seconds, said its own servers “were never breached” and were not the source of the leak.

This appears to instead have been third-party services, which allow users to store images permanently, and seem to have themselves stored large amounts of data.

Recurring problems

“Snapchatters were victimised by their use of third party apps to send and receive Snaps, a practice that we explicitly prohibit in our terms of use precisely because they compromise our users’ security,” the company stated.

A link to the leaked images was reportedly posted on 4chan on Sunday, and while the link has disappeared, 4chan users said they had downloaded the images and planned to make a database searchable by Snapchat username.

The August leak of nude celebrity photos also occurred on 4chan, and some have speculated that the same hackers were involved.

Snapchat has been hit by other security issues recently, including the leak of 4.6 million usernames and phone numbers at the beginning of this year. More recently the service found that hackers had gained control of users’ accounts and used them to send spam messages.

In May, Snapchat also settled charges by US regulators of misleading its users over deleted messages and data collection.

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