For the most part, database has publicly available images

Oct 14, 2014 14:50 GMT  ·  By

Bad news for those expecting saucy content from the Snapchat incident last week, as information from someone who actually reviewed the content says that, for the most part, the images depict people on their daily activities, meaning clothed and doing regular stuff that would not compromise them in any way.

After media outlets started reporting on a massive database with Snapchat content being leaked from Snapsaved.com, an administrator of the website admitted that they were the source of the images and videos as a result of an unauthorized intrusion on a misconfigured Apache server.

Researcher says there’s little nudity in the collection

However, the admin denied on October 11 that the collection was 13GB large and said that the total size of the content could not have been more than 500MB. Moreover, he added that the database had been curated and there was no personal information available that would help someone make the slew of pics searchable by name/username.

The information from the Snapsaved admin seems to be confirmed by security researcher Andrew Conway from Cloudmark, a company providing protection against spam and email-based threats.

Conway managed to get the leaked database and browsed its content. In a blog post published on October 11, he says that “the vast majority of them do not contain nudity. Many are just a text message on a black background, or photos of people pulling faces or showing their day to day activities.”

Some nude photos do exist, though, but most of them are anything but private, since they are old content already available online; in other cases, no face appears in the image.

More reason to not elevate the incident to “snappening” status is the fact that the content depicting people in a certain degree of undress, and a visible face, actually featured professional models “and one had a Playboy logo in the corner.”

Links to fake Snapchat collection could lead to unwanted content

The researcher says that after the entire incident spread across the Internet, multiple individuals tried to make a monetary benefit from it.

Cybercriminals are known to be quick at taking advantage of the latest scandal and use it as a lure to trick unsuspecting users.

“I have seen a lot of fake links claiming to be to the stolen pictures out there, but which in fact are attempts to monetize via installing adware, or using the good old ‘free gift card’ scam,” says Conway.

It would not come as a surprise to see scams on social networks distributing messages that promise access to the full database of images and videos.