Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Software : The source of that Snapchat leak steps forward and fesses up

Software : The source of that Snapchat leak steps forward and fesses up

The source of that Snapchat leak steps forward and fesses up

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The source of that Snapchat leak steps forward and fesses up

From the very beginning Snapchat blamed the massive photo leak dubbed "The Snappening" on an unnamed third-party app.

The privacy fiasco reportedly saw around 13GB worth of personal Snapchat photos leak to trolls on 4chan and elsewhere, but the company insisted its own servers were never hacked.

We had our suspicions at the time about which third-party app was responsible, and over the weekend that company stepped forward to take responsibility.

And yes, it was Snapsaved, not the similarly-named but different service Snapsave - but more importantly the company says the leak poses no further dangers.

At least it doesn't have 'gate' on the end

The owner of Snapsaved, which was used to save Snapchat photos that otherwise would be automatically deleted once viewed, took to the site's official Facebook page to confess its role in The Snappening.

The company blamed the security breach that allowed hundreds of thousands of photos to leak online on "a misconfiguration in our Apache server" and confirmed that Snapchat itself remains secure.

However it's more interesting that this post claims that "the hacker does not have sufficient information to live up to his claims of creating a searchable database," as was threatened last week.

Think again

Snapsaved is no longer up, and its Facebook post says the site was taken down as soon as its owners became aware it had been hacked - although it also claims that only 500MB of data was stolen, which is a far sight less than the 13GB quoted previously.

The site apologized and said it never meant any harm to Snapchat or its users, but now those users will have to decide whether they feel their data is safe with Snapchat after all.

Snapchat hasn't updated its privacy policy since May of this year, and some would say it shouldn't have to. But despite the service's apparent blamelessness in this, it may make you think twice the next time you feel like sticking your smartphone down your pants and snapping a photo.
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