AlJazeera Snapchat hack leaking private photos and child porn

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Tom Ackerman, Al Jazeera, Washington. Now, millions of people like you and me who own one of these, a smartphone, use an application called Snapchat. But over the past couple of days, vast quantities of images that they thought were safe and private have been leaked. Now, for the uninitiated, Snapchat is a smartphone app which allows people to send photographs to one another. What's different about other— to other apps is that Snapchat images will only stay on your phone for a maximum of 10 seconds. Now, you Users can save the photo, but a notification will be sent to the sender. Users, about half of whom are teenagers, trust Snapchat enough to send some, well, let's call them very private images of themselves, which they believe will quickly disappear. But a third-party smartphone app, SnapSaved, allows photos to be saved without even a notification being sent. Now SnapSaved's database has been hacked, and experts estimate that 90,000 images, perhaps more, may have been leaked online. Let's get more on this now from Robert Siciliano. He is an identity theft expert with Hotspot Shield. He joins us now from Boston in the US. Robert, Snapchat says that its servers were never breached. How much of the blame should they accept for this incident?

Well, it looks like, uh, that their API could potentially have been hacked, and if that is the case, um, they should essentially create an API that cannot be reverse engineered. And the fact that so many files have been leaked through this third-party service tells us that it is possible that their service is no more secure on their servers as it is on a third-party server.

All right, so this, this is coming to the fore just now. We're hearing about it in the news, but it's not exactly new. It's been going on for a while, hasn't it?

Yet, well, the, the, the snappening, as it is, is a a term that has been created over the past week, but this breach has been going on for some time, and users' data has been exposed for quite a while. Now what's happening is all this data is being dumped on the web in a variety of different websites and being spread around at a record pace.

Snapchat has a lot of users that are under the age of 18. I could imagine a lot of parents watching this who've never heard of Snapchat will be mightily alarmed.

That is probably the best thing, is the fact that it's gaining this much exposure. Parents are essentially unaware of their children's digital lives. McAfee did a study called the Digital Divide, and we found that as many as 3/4 of all parents are just completely clueless as to what's going on in their child's lives. And in the end, parents need to be aware that, uh, they're getting their kids— their kids are getting themselves and potentially their families into lots of trouble by not only taking these photos but circulating them, because in the end this is considered in many ways child porn.

But Robert, I mean, how— we talked about whether Snapchat had to accept some of the blame. What about users themselves? Snapchat says that users have to accept blame for using a third-party app, but if you join a network and you understand that anything you put out there is going to be deleted after 10 seconds, then You can be forgiven for thinking that you're fairly safe, can't you?

In the end, the onus of responsibility, of course, is on the consumer. I mean, that's just the way it is. It has to be. But they certainly— Snapchat certainly has a responsibility to inform the public of the limitations of their technology, and more than likely that's all being done within the terms of service, the terms and conditions. That being said, when it's hidden in the fine print That generally isn't enough. Essentially, more than likely, you're going to see some form of regulation that is going to require more of an explicit explanation of just what those limitations might be.

Robert, great to talk to you. Many thanks indeed. Robert Siciliano, who's on the