SNAPPENING – The privacy of Internet users has been increasingly abused for months. Intimate photos and videos sent by Snapchat have been stolen and are resurfacing on the Web.
The photos and videos stolen from Snapchat this weekend are said to be more than 100,000. Huge content recovered by hackers using software to record what is sent by this web messaging system. Snapchat is a hit with younger Internet users, thanks to a simple concept: the content sent is ephemeral and self-destructs after 10 seconds. Suffice to say that a lot of messages are of a very subversive nature, erotic photos and videos are regularly exchanged there.
Piracy of the content could turn out to be catastrophic: 200,000 users would be affected, and the posting of their content should be done in an identified manner, since everything is saved with the username. The hackers called their voyeuristic operation « Snappening » and plan to make it all accessible via a platform designed by computer experts, including a search engine to browse stolen files.
Snappening and social dramas
The operation, already announced on confidential forums like 4Chan, could prove destructive. Half of Snapchat users are minors between the ages of 13 and 17. Teenagers therefore, for whom the publication of intimate images could create serious annoyance or malicious inclinations to harm or humiliate. For Snapchat, in any case, this large-scale theft is only due to the irresponsibility of its users, who would have installed third-party applications to their own application, a practice clearly frowned upon by the company now in question. . Software to save content such as Snapsave are particularly highlighted and not to mention screenshots, including « screenshot » of some users ready to share everything without scruple.
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