Staff Writer
| Snapchat logo |
Approximately 900,000
snapchats, the majority of which contain private content, have been exposed to
the public on October 12 by a hacker who then posted them on a site called,
thesnappening.org. The hacker was a 19 year old boy who took the site down when
he was confronted, but claims that he was doing it “to teach people a lesson
about how vulnerable they are making themselves on the internet.”
Snapchat is an instant
messaging app where you can send pictures to anyone with an account for
anywhere from one to ten seconds. Snapping gives the user an illusion of
privacy because the pictures disappear after the timer ends, but this situation
proved that feeling extremely false. A third party snapchat app called
Snapsaved that allows people to save snaps to their camera rolls has admitted
to being a key problem in the leaking of the photos. The owner of Snapsaved
says, “Snapsaved.com was hacked, we had a misconfiguration in our server, and
Snapchat should not be blamed.”
Snapchat started as an obscure social network released in September of 2011, but three years later, it has 100 million active users. 70% of the apps users are females between the age of 13 and 17, and a big portion of these females have admitted to using this app for “sexting”. People who visited thesnappening.org before its removal say, “A majority of the photos were explicit”. Regarding the sexual content side of the issue, Snapsaved.com owner said, “Snapsaved has always tried to fight child pornography, and as soon as we discovered the breach in our system, we immeadiately deleted the entire website and database.”
The most recent
investigations on the hacking have revealed that the boy who leaked the photos
could be in even deeper trouble since having explicit snapchats from girls
under 18, is considered possession of child pornography. Although photos and
videos of almost a million users have been exposed, there are no names attached
to any of the content. Action is being taken to strengthen the security of the apps
that were affected.
