Hackers are threatening to publish thousands more explicit images sent through Snapchat.

Photos posted on a message board in the last few days have since been taken down.

Users who had accessed the service through third-party apps, and not the official Snapchat app, have had their images intercepted.

The company said its servers "were never breached".

Newsbeat's tech reporter, Jonathan Blake, says they are calling this "the Snappening".

"Its after the so-called Fappening which involved naked celebrity photos," he explained.

We've decided to take a look at exactly what's going on.

What's happened?

Hackers posted Snapchat photos on a message board on Thursday night. They have since been removed.

According to Business Insider reporter James Cook there's a threat more could be posted, with hackers boasting of having access to 13 gigabytes' (GB) worth of pictures.

Its claimed the photos have been intercepted over a number of years.

Where have the photos actually come from?

Not Snapchat, according to Snapchat.

The source of the leak has pointed towards two third-party, unauthorised services that offered the ability to save Snapchat messages permanently.

Its believed that at least one such service was keeping a database of all the pictures and videos that had passed through it.

One report suggests the hacked third-party Snapchat client was Snapsave.

What's Snapsave?

Its a popular Android app.

It allows users to keep Snapchat photos and videos, which of course automatically delete when viewed through the official Snapchat app.

Developer Georgie Casey has denied his app is to blame though.

"Our app had nothing to do with it and we've never logged username and passwords," he told Engadget.

He also denied that Snapsave stores photos online.

What's Snapchat said?

Good question.

On Friday, the company said: "Snapchatters were victimised 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."

Is this linked to other hacks?

Like the one involving celebrities and the iCloud? No.

These are said to be pictures of regular users but there are some doubts whether the images are real or fake.

Last month, photos of celebrities were shared on websites Reddit and 4chan after initially being taken from stars' iCloud accounts.

Hasn't Snapchat been in trouble before?

In a word, yes.

In several...

4.6 million usernames and phone numbers were leaked online at the start of the year.

More recently, the service has been suffering from spam messages being sent out from users' accounts without their knowledge.

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