The latest headline in the celebrity nude photo hacking scandal drags Snapchat through the mill. Apparently on 12 October 200,000 images will be sent out, all taken not from the iCloud but from Snapsave.
Snapsave is a third-party service which Snapchat is adamantly pointing out and making clear it was not its servers that were hacked. Instead users who utilised Snapsave to store photos and videos, that would otherwise vanish on Snapchat, have apparently shot themselves in the foot.
At this stage this is all claims being made by users on 4chan. Though with the previous track record it’s fairly likely these claims are true. There have also been more images leaking as part of the “Fappening” which are being sold on file sharing sites for Bitcoin payments.
Snapchat’s official statement was: "We can confirm that Snapchat's servers were never breached and were not the source of these leaks. Snapchatters were victimised by their use of third-party apps to send and receive Snaps, a practice that we expressly prohibit in our Terms of Use precisely because they compromise our users' security. We vigilantly monitor the App Store and Google Play for illegal third-party apps and have succeeded in getting many of these removed."
Business Insider reported that the service acted as a web client for the Snapchat app allowing users to receive photos and videos to save online. But the site was quietly collecting everything that passed through it. These incriminating Snapchats were stored on a web server along with the usernames of sender details.
We will have to wait until Sunday 12 October to see if this claimed hack is a reality.