200,000 private Snapchat images astray | Hacker News Reader

200,000 private Snapchat images astray

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68 pointsPaulSec29 comments

I'm pretty sure this is a fake. This Kenny Withers guy - (NSFW) http://kennywithers.com/featured-online-marketing-articles/t... seems to be posting it to a bunch of different news sites who are all reporting it now.

Tineye some of the images that are purportedly from the "leak", the few that I've checked have been around for a long time.

This is interesting, as he seems to be working in Marketing it could be a stunt, right?

A stunt that is designed to kill the app Snapsave.

but doesn't it also brilliantly highlight the inherent problem with Snapchat?

Agreed. I'd also be very surprised if Snapsave was routing user traffic through their servers. Apps like 6snap connect directly to Snapchat and everything works fine... so storing images on their own servers shouldn't be necessary.

I understand the confusion that you may have regarding this "Snappening" event. I am Kenny Withers, the one that chronicled the original chatter on 4chan and blogged about it. My only purpose for exposing this event was to create awareness of the now confirmed leak of almost 100,000 stolen images and videos from the snapsaved.com website. My website has suffered outages as a result of this event, the website overloaded my old webhost and they did not have the ability to scale to handle the traffic. I have since switched hosts. To read more about the details of this discovery, please read the following Forbes article: forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/10/10/snapchat-hack-not-a-hoax-says-snappening-chronicler/

Thanks

The more interesting thing about this is that it is likely to result in a higher 'hit' rating of nude/risky pics as somebody using snapsave inherently is intentionally attempting to keep pictures the sender knew were going to be automatically deleted.

Another concern would be the age range in these pictures. I personally perceive snapchat as a 'young' persons app. I have a feeling a lot of these pictures will be classified as child porn (sub 18 pics).

Snapchat is a very young people oriented app 50% of all users are aged 13-17 which almost definitely means that there are significant amounts of illegal pictures being hosted. This brings in an interesting area of questioning, does this mean that Snapsave could get in any sort of legal trouble for storing these images?

The hackers in this case have compromised a lot of young peoples intimate images which I imagine would make them very liable and open themselves up to legal troubles in that domain too, and I can't help but feel sorry for the people who did send these pictures who had them stored against their knowledge by someone they may have cared about and are now out there for any perv to grab a copy of.

This brings in an interesting area of questioning, does this mean that Snapsave could get in any sort of legal trouble for storing these images?

I find it hard to believe, what makes Snapsave different from any other file hosting service? As far as I know, no service provider is liable unless they are aware of any specific illegal content being uploaded.

Actually, i'm 27.. But the app itselve is quite funny while dating (except the best-friends visible part)

You can turn it off.

how?

So Snapsave, which saves photos and videos received in Snapchat on your own device, also uploads them to their servers? That's pretty damn creepy.

As do all the internet nodes, mobile network hubs and their accompanying spy/malware, that your pics use to travel from your phone to those servers...

Those aren't intentionally indexed and persisted.

I still don't get it. How people can seriously believe that something you send to another, uncontrollable device can be displayed once but impossible to be saved for later use? This had to happen, sooner or later.

Good question. A lot of people don't believe in DRM, which operates on a very similar principle, but maybe because Snapchat is perceived as user-friendly while DRM isn't?

It's not as if they don't know about the analogue hole either - a lot of people who have absolutely no clue about how a computer works will, when asked to take a screenshot, point their camera/phone at the monitor.

"Because the other phone will automatically delete it, right?"

Even programmers end up doing things like putting ctitical validation into client-side code. Most people will not have even thought about Snapchat not working as advertised.

More information can be found here: http://kennywithers.com/featured-online-marketing-articles/t...

Edit: NSFW, sorry for not noting that earlier.

I don't like how this guys reporting it like a big game, it's really messed up.

NSFW

That guy is a piece of shit for actually posting some of the pics. Can we find out who he does business with. Who hires him?

I'm betting it's fake. I tineyed a few of those pics from the "leak" and they've been around for ages.

Well there goes his database: "Error establishing a database connection" :).

Here is a Google cache version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ChdulMZ...

So - what are the odds that this is yet another spoof?

what is a private snap?

its an oxymoron

I wonder if this will hurt snapchat. $10bil valuation and this breach hits at the heart of their product. Maybe yahoo can withdraw their $20mil if they have not actually handed it over.

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