The Snappening

Overview

The Snappening refers to the massive leak of up to 200,000 privately archived photographs and more than 90,000 videos of Snapchat users obtained by unidentified hackers through a security breach in the third-party web-based client SnapSaved.com. Upon the release of the first volume in mid-October 2014, it was instantly dubbed the "Snappening" in reference to The Fappening, a similar event that had unfolded in the previous month, during which hundreds of nude photographs of well-known celebrities were leaked and circulated online.

Background

On October 9th, 2014, an anonymous 4chan user posted a collection of images claimed to have been taken from the third party SnapChat client SnapSaved.

Notable Developments

Snapchat Statement

On October 10th, Snapchat issued a press statement confirming that their servers were not breached and blamed the leak on the use of third-party applications, which the company prohibits its terms of use.^[5]

We can confirm that Snapchat’s servers were never breached and were not the source of these leaks. 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.

Online Reaction

On October 10th, Redditor katchoovanski submitted a post about the hack to the /r/technology^[8] subreddit. The same day, the /r/thesnappening^[6] subreddit was launched for discussions about the leak. On October 11th, the /snappening/ board was launched on 8chan.^[7] Initially, many Internet users were skeptical about the claims due to lack of evidence until screenshots and data analysis of the alleged collections surfaced online.

SnapSave Statement

On October 11th, 2014, Snapsaved confirmed via its Facebook page^[4] that the site had been hacked as a result of a misconfiguration in its Apache server, though the company refuted some earlier reports surrounding the scale of the leak by stating that only about 500MB worth of images had been compromised.

"The recent rumours about the snappening are a hoax. The hacker does not have sufficient information to live up to his claims."

News Media Coverage

In the coming days, several news sites published articles about the leaked files, including Forbes,^[9] The Daily Beast,^[10] Readwrite,^[11] The Guardian,^[12] RT^[13] and Business Insider.^[14]

Search Interest

External References