Snapsaved Takes Responsibility For Latest Snapchat Leak

Last week, news spread that some 200,000 Snapchat photos had leaked after a third-party app (used to save people’s snaps) was hacked. It was referred to as the Snappening.

Snapchat was quick to respond to the situation by saying that the photos had been stolen from a third-party application, but that Snapchat’s servers were never compromised. Turns out, Snapsaved.com is stepping forward and taking responsibility for the leak.

In an update posted to the company’s Facebook page, Snapsaved claims full responsibility and also gives a bit more clarity about what was hacked and what information was made available.

According to the statement, the hackers never had access to any personal information such as usernames, though they did access 500MB of images, “as far as [Snapsaved] can tell.”

The company also responded to accusations that it might have purposefully provided hackers with access to the image database, saying that it immediately shut down the entire Snapsaved website and database as soon as they detected the breach.

The majority of affected users are Swedish, Norwegian and American, says the statement.

You can read the full explanation below:

I would like to elaborate on the recent events regarding Snapsaved.com
Snapsaved.com Was a website used to save SnapChat’s, precisely as the app snapsave.
In response to recent media events and the statement made by http://pastebin.com/cJcTbNz8, I would like to inform the public that snapsaved.com was hacked, the dictionary index the poster is referring to, was never publicly available. We had a misconfiguration in our Apache server.
SnapChat has not been hacked, and these images do not originate from their database.
Snapsaved has always tried to fight child pornography, we have even gone as far, as to reporting some of our
Users to the Swedish and Norwegian authorities.
As soon as we discovered the breach in our systems, we immediately deleted the entire website and the database
Associated with it. As far as we can tell, the breach has effected 500MB of images, and 0 personal information
From the database.
The recent rumors about the snappening are a hoax. The hacker does not have sufficient information to live up to his claims
Of creating a searchable Database.
Our users had to consent to all the content they received via SnapSaved.com, as we mentioned, we tried to cleanse the database of inappropriate images as often as possible.
The majority of our users are Swedish, Norwegian and American.
I sincerely apologize on the behalf of snapsaved.com we never wished for this to happen. We did not wish to cause SnapChat or their users any harm, we only wished to provide a unique service.

We’ve reached out to Snapsaved for more information and will update if/when we hear back.

[via The Guardian]