Nude photos of users who have exchanged them with others through the Snapchat service have been leaked online, with hackers threatening to upload more. Users who used Snapchat through an application other than the official one suddenly found their photos online.
Since most users of the app are between 13 and 17 years old, there is a risk that these photos are of children.
As the service states, their servers were never at risk of attacks and users fell victim to services outside the company's official application in order to send and receive Snaps, an action they warn about in their Terms of Use.
“We monitor the App Store and Google Play very closely for such third-party services and have often been able to remove them from the system,” Snapchat said.
On the other hand, they should have been more careful with their users' data, as many security experts say.
“To turn around and say that it’s the users’ fault for what happened is pretty harsh,” says Mark James, an ESET expert.
The photos were posted online with a download link on a forum on Thursday night. The link has since been deleted, but the hackers are threatening to release thousands more photos they have in their possession.
Of course, there are many who disagree with the authenticity of the photos and talk about edited or fake photos, and this is because although Snapchat allows the exchange of photos and videos, the data disappears from the system after a few seconds.
Suspicions about how all this material was collected (about 13 GB according to what the hackers say) are based on the ability of a third-party application to store users' messages and keep in a database all the files exchanged between users.
Security consultant Brian Honan adds this as yet another problem with Snapchat's security and user data protection.
At the beginning of the year, 4.6 million usernames and phone numbers were leaked, and more recently the service faced a serious problem with spam messages that users were sending without even knowing it.
“According to the law, the service does not have a security gap, but users demand the security of their data and expect the company to have the appropriate systems in place to ensure this,” Honan said.
