Thousands of Snapchat images and videos that were taken by teenagers have been released online.
Tens of thousands of images were stored on a third party website and have now been released in a massive leak that is being dubbed ‘The Snappening’. The Daily Beast confirmed this morning that the photographs had been leaked online through viralpop.com.
The file was apparently downloaded thousands of times before the website was deleted.
The news has caused public outrage, as 50 per cent of Snapchat users are between 13 and 17 years of age. Many reports claim that a number of these leaked images can thus be classed as child pornography.
It has been reported that about 9,000 videos and 90,000 photos have been leaked, with a large proportion of the numbers originating from Europe.
It has also been suggested that the leak could well be connected to the hacking of Snapsave, a third-party app which collects Snapchat videos and pictures, though this was denied to Engadget by their representative, Georgie Casey.
Another website, Snapsaved is also an alleged source of the leak as the site issued a statement over the weekend which read; “I would like to inform the public that snapsaved.com was hacked, the dictionary index the poster is referring to, was never publicly available.”
