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Hackers Release 13 Gigabytes Of 'Deleted' Snapchat Photos

PALO ALTO (KCBS) — Hackers released hundreds of thousands of Snapchat photos on Sunday that users of the app thought were deleted, some of which are reportedly of nude minors.

New of the stolen private photos was first reported late last week. About 50 percent of Snapchat's users are 13-17 years old, making it likely that some of the images are child pornography.

UPDATE: 

Snapsaved App Takes Responsibility For Snapchat Hack Of Thousands Of Private Photos

Snapchat, a photo-messaging app, was created by three Stanford students as way to send photos to friends but have them deleted after few seconds. While there have been some security problems before, the fault appears to be with a third party apps such as Snapsave or SnapKeep, which have been cataloging every snap that users thought had been deleted.

Hackers Release Thousands Of 'Deleted' Snapchat Photos

"There are these third party apps out there that basically piggyback on Snapchat and enable you to do the very thing you're not supposed to do, which is save the photos that you send and receive. And this is due to a vulnerability in Snapchat's software that Snapchat has been aware of for some time and they've done little things here and there to, sort of, shore it up but clearly it's still vulnerable," Issie Lapowsky, a staff writer for Wired, said.

About 13GB of photos, which amounts to about 200,000 photos, were released on 4chan on Sunday.

Some users on 4chan warned that the photos would be leaked online in a database that's searchable by Snapchat username. It's already being dubbed as "The Snappening," and could be bigger than the hacks that recently targeted celebrities.

About half of Snapchat's users are teenagers so many of the nude photos and observers say that anyone downloading the files could be breaking child pornography laws if any of the pictures includes unclothed pictures of children under 16.

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