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Hackers Warn Leaking Thousands Of Snapchat Pics

Thousands of Snapchat users might soon suffer the same fate as Jennifer Lawrence now that hackers threaten to leak more than 200,000 pictures and videos, many of them nude and private, shared via the photo-sharing app.

The Snapchat photos and videos may be posted on the popular online messaging board 4Chan, the same site that posted many of the nude photos of Lawrence and other female celebrities in August, USA Today reported.

Hackers were able to collect user photos and videos sent through a third-party app that lets them save shared Snapchat photos without the other person knowing it. Within the standalone Snapchat app, photos and videos that users send to friends “disappear” after up to 10 seconds, but recipients can always screenshot the images without the senders’ knowledge.

While the act was clearly unacceptable, Snapchat blamed the users’ use of third-party applications such as Snap Save and Quick Save.

In a series of tweets, the company said that “Snapchatters were victimized by their use of third-party apps to send and receive Snaps, a practice that we expressly prohibit in our ToU [terms of use],” Salon reported.

[quote text_size=”small” author=”–Snapchat (@snapchat)”]

We can confirm that Snapchat’s servers were never breached and were not the source of these leaks.

[/quote]

“We vigilantly monitor the App Store and Google Play for illegal third-party apps and have succeeded in getting many of these removed.”

Snapchat is popularly known as a ‘sexting’ app where users–many of them young people–usually share racy and explicit photos. As early as 2012, the Federal Trade Commission warned of Snapchat’s vulnerability to third party applications, Mashable reported.

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