‘The Snappening’ Is Real: 90,000 Private Photos and 9,000 Hacked Snapchat Videos Leak Online

THE DAILY BEAST — First came “The Fappening,” wherein hackers breached Apple’s online storage system iCloud and leaked hundreds of private nude photos and videos of female celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence, Cara Delevingne, Kim Kardashian, Rihanna, and others. A crude portmanteau of “fapping” (online slang for masturbation) and the M. Night Shyamalan disaster The Happening, the cache of stolen content spread like wildfire on the message boards 4chan and Reddit. It was reportedly pilfered via “brute force” attacks—attempting thousands of key combinations—since the iCloud places no limit on the number of passwords one can try.

Now, there’s “The Snappening”—a leak of approximately 90,000 photos and 9,000 videos stolen off the mobile app Snapchat. The Daily Beast can confirm that despite rumors of a hoax, the leak is genuine, and most of the affected users hail from Europe, which makes up 32 percent of its overall audience, according to Snapchat. Unlike “The Fappening,” the victims are split fairly evenly between males and females, but like “The Fappening,” much of the content is explicit in nature.