Snapchat Leaks Confirmed: Celebrities Joined By Citizens

This morning it's been made clear that Snapchat has had a bit of a breach. Not through Snapchat itself, but through 3rd-party servers of Snapchat images. Snapchat does not explicitly allow the use of their servers or their services to any other 3rd party – but apps get through, and these apps have been breached. The developers of Snapchat have released a statement on the subject, suggesting that it was not their fault directly, but that they'd planned on continuing their assault on malicious fakers of Snapchat services.

So there was no hack of Snapchat directly – but it doesn't really matter. Thousands of personal images from everyday citizens – not celebrities, this time – were shared, thousands of personal images were leaked. These images are now creeping their way through the internet and are effectively "out there" for all to see.

"We can confirm that Snapchat's servers were never breached and were not the source of these leaks," said Snapchat in a statement. Snapchat representatives continued, "Snapchatters were victimized by their use of third-party apps to send and receive Snaps, a practice that we expressly prohibit in our Terms of Use precisely because they compromise our users' security."

A Snapchat representative went on to say that they "vigilantly monitor the App Store and Google Play for illegal third-party apps and have succeeded in getting many of these removed."

According to Business Insider it was the now-down SnapChat service called SnapSaved that was at fault. There's also a service called "SnapSave" – without the "d" at the end – that's being tagged as the one at fault. We're going to go ahead and guess it was a combination of several services over the course of several weeks or months – or even years.

What can we learn from this? That no service is safe enough to expect total anonymity and privacy. If you want to share your personal bits with a friend, colleague, or significant other, do it in real life. Or everyone will see those bits and you'll be left out in the cold.