A purported hack of the popular Snapchat app that surfaced on Internet forums late last week has been attributed not to a breach of the company's infrastructure, but rather an unauthorized third-party website that some users have used to save pictures from the app.
According to Business Insider, rumors of the hack first surfaced on the 4Chan web forum, where an anonymous hacker claimed to have stolen photos from 200,000 Snapchat users. Many of the photos were said to have been nude images, which was particularly troubling considering half of the company's users are under 18 and such pictures would be considered child pornography.
On Friday, Snapchat denied the rumors, and issued a statement saying its servers had not been breached. Simultaneously, it blamed users for using unauthorized third-party apps to save pictures.
"We can confirm that Snapchat’s servers were never breached and were not the source of these leaks," the statement began, Venture Beat reported.
"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."
After the repudiation of the allegations, users began pointing the finger at several third-party apps.
On Saturday, SnapSaved.com released a statement on Facebook saying it was the third-party that had been hacked. Instead of photos from 200,000 users however, it said the hackers had only gotten away with 500 megabytes worth of photos — roughly 10,000 pictures.
"SnapChat has not been hacked, and these images do not originate from their database," it began. "As far as we can tell, the breach has effected 500MB of images, and 0 personal information from the database . . . The hacker does not have sufficient information to live up to his claims of creating a searchable database."
Luckily, SnapSaved.com has been defunct for months, and the administrators explained that, "As soon as we discovered the breach in our systems, we immediately deleted the entire website and the database."
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