The Snappening: Hackers threaten to leak 'at least 100,000' Snapchat photos

Hackers on the website 4chan boasted that they have accessed "at least 100,000" Snapchat images on Friday, Oct. 10, 2014.

Users of the popular photosharing site Snapchat who believe their photos and videos self-destruct shortly after being sent, may be surprised to learn that there are circumstances in which they don’t, and hackers who’ve been collecting an archive of the material have reportedly posted them online.

Hackers are boasting on the website 4chan that they have accessed "at least 100,000" images, many reportedly of an explicit nature, that were sent via third-party apps.

Business Insider reports that hackers, after collecting the images for years, 4chan users began creating a searchable database of the material on Thursday.

While the source of the material isn't known, there are reports pointing the finger at third-party apps that were designed to save the files that would otherwise self-destruct after they were viewed in Snapchat.

"We can confirm that Snapchat's servers were never breached and were not the source of the leaks," a Snapchat spokesperson said in a statement. "Snapchatters were victimized by their use of third-party apps to send and receive Snaps, a practice that we expressly prohibit in our Terms of Use because they compromise our users' security. We vigilantly monitor the App Store and Google Play for illegal third-party apps and have succeeded in getting many of these removed."

4chan users are referring to this incident as the "Snappening" – a take-off of last month's iCloud celebrity photo leak that was popularly dubbed the "Fappening."

If there are as many photos and videos as reports suggest, it could dwarf the celebrity photo leak in terms of size.