There isn't sufficient info to create a searchable database

Oct 13, 2014 23:01 GMT  ·  By

The Snappening, as the Internet has come to call last week's incident with leaked content from Snapchat users, is not real and the rumors about creating a database searchable by username have no grounds, the administrator of Snapsaved.com, the website that allowed the data to be exposed, says.

Snapsaved was created as a service for Snapchat users to retain the ephemeral images and videos sent through Snapchat, and have access to the content for a longer period of time.

Last week, posts on the anonymous image board 4Chan suggested that a massive collection of Snapchat content has been leaked and that effort is put into organizing the database and making it searchable.

It was soon discovered that Snapchat had not been hacked and that the items had been taken from a third-party. According to reports, thousands downloaded the illegal content.

Server hack is publicly acknowledged, things aren’t so bad

The Snapsaved.com admin published a statement on Facebook, letting users know that the amount of data stolen from Snapsaved.com was not as large as it was claimed on various forums and in media reports.

Furthermore, contrary to information that Snapsaved.com made available to the public the data collected from Snapchat, the admin says that the website was hacked due to a misconfiguration in the Apache server, denying reports saying otherwise.

“The recent rumors about the snappening are a hoax. The hacker does not have sufficient information to live up to his claims of creating a searchable database,” the post on Facebook reads.

It appears that the database taken from the poorly set up machine was 500MB large, consisting of images. On 4Chan last week, posters talked about a much larger cache, 13GB of pictures (around 100,000 of them) and videos.

Inappropriate pictures unlikely to have been included

Another inconsistency with the details presented online is the nature of the content in the images.

It appears that Snapsaved either had some sort of mechanism in place to sort out inappropriate images or they reserved the right through terms of service to browse and curate user content.

Supporting this conclusion is the fact that the administrator said that “Snapsaved has always tried to fight child pornography, we have even gone as far, as to reporting some of our Users to the Swedish and Norwegian authorities.”

Immediately after the discovery of the breach on their systems, Snapsaved was taken down along with the database associated with it.

Considering this incident, it is safe to assume that Snapchat users will be more careful with selecting a third-party service to host their personal media content for more permanent storage.