Hackers steal 500 MB of photographs from Snapsaved.com servers
14 Oct 2014
Snapsaved.com, a website that lets users save images sent via Snapchat, claimed yesterday that its servers had been breached by hackers who made off with some 500 megabytes of photographs, Reuters reported.
The little-known website's claim has shed some light on reports in past days that hackers had been preparing to unleash some 13 gigabytes of photographs sent via SnapChat, a mobile app popular among teenagers that promised users that any pictures relayed to other users would be deleted in a matter of seconds.
Users could however use special websites and third-party apps like Snapsaved.com to save images they received on their smartphones, with or without the knowledge of SnapChat.
The company, last week, blamed SnapChat third-party apps, which could be downloaded separately and used in conjunction with its service, for any photos that might have been stolen or leaked.
The possibility of a torrent of photos made publicly available via an indexed, online database had led to concerns about potentially inappropriate images of minors.
Yesterday, Snapsaved.com said on its Facebook page that it deleted its entire website and database as soon as the intrusion came to its notice.
It remained unclear as to who wrote the post on Snapsaved.com's Facebook page, which had been active since 2013. Meanwhile, the website had gone down.
After word spread last week that around 200,000 Snapchat photos had leaked online, Snapsaved was now taking responsibility for the whole debacle, PC Mag reported.
Admitting in a Facebook post over the weekend that a recent hack of its systems, the company said in a post what led to the leak, and provided more clarity about the extent of the breach.
"I would like to inform the public that Snapsaved.com was hacked," the post reads. "Snapchat has not been hacked, and these images do not originate from their database."
According to the creators of the site, they "immediately" deleted their entire database upon discovering the breach. Around 500MB of images were stolen, with the majority of affected users being Swedish, Norwegian, and American. It added, no other personal information was accessed.
Close on the heels of the breach last week, Snapchat said its servers were never compromised and that users were instead victimised by their use of third-party apps.
Snapchat had warned about the use of non-official apps to interact with its service for quite some time.
