A 4chan user and hacker has announced that thousands of nude photos stolen from Snapchat users will be released on Sunday Oct. 12th to a searchable database.
The massive leak, which has been christened "The Snappening" by 4chan users, is expected to include about 200,000 nude images and videos.
Reports indicate that apart from photos, the unknown hacker's leak would also include user IDs recently obtained from Snapchat. Meanwhile, 4chan users will reportedly be able to search for nude photos of private individuals by their names.
According to the anonymous hacker and 4chan user, the 13 gigabytes of the private and now potentially destructive images and videos were amassed over years via a third-party app - Snapsave.com. These documents collected by the 4chan hacker would reportedly have been destroyed by Snapchat.
Snapchat strongly cautions its users from using unaffiliated third-party apps. Meanwhile, the company has responded to the news, stating that its servers were never hacked and that the images were acquired from another source.
"We can confirm that Snapchat's servers were never breached and were not the source of these leaks," a Snapchat communiqué reads.
"Snapchatters were victimized by their use of third-party app to send and receive Snaps, a practice that we expressly prohibit in our Terms of User precisely because they compromise our security," the statement said.
Concern over the leak and its implications - both legal and social - are being examined widely. Reports indicate that the bulk of Snapchat users are teenagers between 13 and 17 years.
Legal expert say the "explicit nature" of Snapchat and the "Snappening" release may constitute child pornography. If this hold to be true, the distribution and possession of these images could have gave legal consequences including prison time.
The 4chan leaked photos may mark a change in cyber-security following the recent release of nude photos of several celebrities which were accessed from Apples's Cloud service.
