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  • Snapchat servers 'were never breached,' but your snaps may still be compromised (update)

    by 
    Ben Gilbert
    Ben Gilbert
    10.10.2014

    Snapchat is a photo sharing service known for its temporary nature: you send a photo to a friend, a few seconds later the photo disappears and is erased. If you snap a screen of the image, Snapchat tells the other person. That's the elevator pitch, anyway. A variety of third-party apps skirt around that temporality, enabling users to secretly save the images they're sent -- occasionally of the nude variety -- and anonymous internet forum 4chan is claiming it hacked one of those apps to access hundreds of thousands of images. Worse, those images are allegedly tied to usernames. Yes, that means your images may be at risk of exposure. Snapchat can't confirm the alleged leak because it didn't involve the company's servers if it did happen, but the company says its data centers are secure. Here's what Snapchat told us: "We can confirm that Snapchat's servers were never breached and were not the source of these leaks. Snapchatters were victimized 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."