Over the weekend, third-party Snapchat service Snapsaved confirmed it was hacked. The good news is that it claims only 500MB of data were compromised. The bad news is that it could still be a lot of snaps.
It seems the Snapchat hack — The Snappening — isn’t as bad as initially reported. Though we heard that as many as 13GB of data may have been compromised, it seems that number might be much smaller. On its Facebook page, Snapsaved writes:
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 rumours about the snappening are a hoax. The hacker does not have sufficient information to live up to his claims of creating a searchable Database.
In other words, the Pastebin post in which an anonymous user claimed to have access to hundreds thousands of photos and videos is a lie. To put Snapsaved’s post in perspective: 500MB is roughly 10,000 Snapchat photos worth of data, and it appears that data doesn’t come with the personal information that could be used to link it back to you.
Snapsaved apologised for the hack, noting that a majority of it users are in the United States, Sweden and Norway,
On Friday, Snapchat said its servers were never compromised, and Snapsaved’s story seems to gel with that. If it indeed turns out that only 10,000 photos were obtained, that’s something of a relief, if we really be said to be relieved about what amounts to a lot of exposed user data. [Snapsaved]