App That Saves Snapchat Snaps Has Lost ‘Em

Users of Snapchat, which makes messages and photos go poof after seconds, are sometimes more at ease taking supposedly temporary nude selfies. They shouldn’t be.

“On Friday morning, the denizens of the anonymous forum 4chan were digging through what they described as a massive collection of photos and videos from the website Snapsaved.com, mostly searching for nude images sent by unsuspecting girls” on Snapchat, Wired reports.

Snapsaved, an illegal third party app that archives snaps, apparently is the source of the leak.

A 13 gigabyte horde of snaps has exposed Snapchat’s careless development practices, say security researchers.

Analyst Adam Caudill, who has been reverse engineering Snapchat’s code for years, warned the company in 2012 that he could build a pirate app that stripped out its time-deletion features.

“Your average developer can build something in a day’s time that interacts with Snapchat’s API and saves everything that comes through it,” he said.

Snapchat says its own servers were never hacked.

It’s unknown how Snapsaved.com stored users’ photos, but the service no doubt left them far more vulnerable to hackers than Snapchat itself.