In an event reminiscent of last month's hacking of dozens of celebrities' cell phones, photo messaging application Snapchat has fallen to the same sort of hack, but on a much larger scale.

Nicknamed "The Snappening," third-party app Snapsave has been hacked and around 200,000 users are under risk. Snapsave allows users to receive Snapchat photos and videos, then save the media without the sender knowing.

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The hackers, who has not been identified, were able to distribute the images and video to 4Chan, along with other image and video boards. 

Snapsave was a cloud-based service, taken off the Google Play store a few weeks ago. The website SnapSaved.com is also defunct, potentially pointing the finger at the app creator. The hackers posted on 4Chan one week ago that they had hacked the service, following up with the photos a week later, with more to come.

It appears whoever owned the Snapsave app failed to properly secure the cloud servers, and also failed to update the app. These sort of third-party apps are unregulated by Snapchat, and the team works with both iOS and Android curators to get them off the store front.

"We can confirm that Snapchat's servers were never breached and were not the source of these leaks," Snapchat said in a statement today. "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 precisely 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." 

Tagssnapchat, Snapchat hack, SnapSave, photo leaks, hacks