Snapchat blames photo leaks on third-party apps

[Windsorlou]

Snapchat blames photo leaks on third-party apps

PUBLISHED : Sunday, 12 October, 2014, 6:38am
UPDATED : Sunday, 12 October, 2014, 6:38am

Reuters in San Francisco

Snapchat blames photo leaks on third-party apps

Mobile messaging company Snapchat has blamed third-party software apps for security lapses that have put its users' private photos at risk of online publication by hackers.

A file containing at least 100,000 Snapchat photos had been collected by hackers who were preparing to publish them online, according to a report on the Business Insider blog. Snapchat lets users send photos and videos that disappear in seconds.

"We can confirm that Snapchat servers were never breached and were not the source of these leaks," the company said.

Users were "allegedly victimised 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".

Snapchat, one of a crop of new apps that compete with Twitter and Facebook, is popular among teenagers. Some media reports raised concerns that the hackers' file could contain nude "selfie" pictures of teens who expected the photos to be deleted.

Leaked photos could also become problematic for Snapchat, which has faced criticism over privacy practices. It is now raising money in a funding round that would give it a US$10 billion valuation, according to reports.

According to Business Insider, hackers may have obtained the photos by breaching third-party services that allow consumers to save the Snapchat photos they receive. Users of the online forum 4Chan downloaded the files and were creating a searchable database of the stolen photos, the report said.

Tal Klein, a vice president at cloud security firm Adallom, said he could not rule out the possibility that the incident was a hoax.

He noted some of the purported Snapchat photos posted on 4Chan had digital signatures that matched his firm's database of stolen images previously circulated online. That suggested the episode could be fictitious, or that the supposed cache of new photos was a collection of previously stolen Snapchat images aggregated by hackers, said Klein.

The development comes after nude pictures of Jennifer Lawrence and dozens of other actresses were posted on 4Chan.

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Hackers access payment cards of Kmart customers

Sears Holdings said hackers have stolen the details of some customer payment cards at its Kmart stores, the latest in a series of computer security breaches to hit US companies.

The US Secret Service confirmed it was investigating the breach, which occurred in September and compromised the systems of Kmart, which has about 1,200 stores across the United States. The breach did not affect the Sears department store chain.

A Sears spokesman said he could not say how many credit and debit card numbers had been taken.

The spokesman added that the personal information, debit card PINs, email addresses and social security numbers of its customers remained safe.

Security professionals said they were not surprised to learn that yet another major retailer was reporting a breach, adding they believed many big merchants did not have adequate systems for detecting cyberattacks.