The segment reports on a possible mass breach dubbed the "Snapening," in which up to 200,000 Snapchat accounts may have been compromised. Snapchat officials state their servers were never breached and attribute the leaks to third‑party apps that secretly save snaps, a practice prohibited in their terms of use. The discussion highlights that a large portion of Snapchat’s user base is aged 13‑17, raising serious concerns about the circulation of underage nude images and child pornography. Security expert Robert Siciliano explains how hackers collect and repost these data dumps on websites, exposing both adult and minor content. Snapchat’s official statement emphasizes monitoring app stores to remove illegal third‑party apps. The segment concludes with a broader warning that digital content, even when intended to disappear, may never truly be erased.
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Big concern for parents if your children use Snapchat.
A giant breach, hundreds of thousands of photos about to be leaked, some of them posted on the same websites involved in the celebrity hacking scandals a while back. Making things worse, half of Snapchat's users are between the ages of 13 and 17. Tonight, Snapchat's Says it is not their fault. WGN's Gaynor Hall is in the newsroom with details. Hi, Gaynor.
Hi, Mark and Micah. Another day, another possible mass hacking to tell you about, and they're calling this one the Snapening. A spokesperson for the photo-sharing app Snapchat tells us they cannot confirm reports that the accounts of as many as 200,000 users were hacked. Snapchat says its servers have never been breached, but the leaks reportedly are from third-party apps. So we know many of you are asking, what is Snapchat? Basically, it's an app for iPhone and Android Android that allows you to send photos and short videos that are supposed to disappear once they've been viewed. And because of that, Snapchat is a popular way to send nude photos. But here's the catch. Anyone could take a screen grab of a snap and save it to their phone. And there are these third-party apps that promise to save Snapchat photos secretly without informing the sender. Snapchat is blaming those apps for this possible breach. And even more problematic, Snapchat's user demographic skews young, very young. We're talking 13 to 17 years old. Raising questions about child porn. Hacked pictures are reportedly already circulating on the internet with help of the messaging board that has been linked to those hacked celebrity iPhone pics.
A lot of these, um, hackers, they will take these data dumps, basically the hacked information, and they'll dump it onto these websites that allow anyone basically to peruse all of that data, to sift through it. And here you have all kinds of essentially, you know, pornography, snaps as it will, that are adults and underage people.
So here is the official statement from Snapchat, quote: We confirm that Snapchat servers were never breached and were not the source of these leaks. Snapchatters were allegedly 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. The statement going on to say that Snapchat vigilantly monitors the App Store and Google Play in an effort to get those illegal third-party apps removed. Now there are some questioning whether the photos were actually hacked or if they already existed on the internet, but Mark and Mike, bottom line here, experts say even if Snapchat promises your photo or video will disappear, there is no guarantee that anything you send in a digital format will ever Go away.
