First conviction in notorious 2014 nude celeb hacking scandal
The first conviction of one of the people responsible for the notorious nude celebrity hacking scandal of 2014 has been announced by prosecutors.
Dubbed “Celebgate” and “The Fappening”, hundreds of photos of nude or semi-nude photos of various Hollywood celebrities were leaked online, onto Internet bulletin board 4Chan, including photos of Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Kirsten Dunst and Mary Elizabeth Winstead.
Given the high profile nature of the leaks, authorities were keen to get to the bottom of them, and this week the first conviction related to the scandal has been announced. Ryan Collins from Pennsylvania pleaded guilty to committing a series of phishing scams aimed at tricking people into giving up their passwords for their Apple iCloud accounts, as well as unauthorised access to those accounts.
Collins faces a number of years in jail, though he will most likely serve shy of two. Despite the conviction, the investigations are on-going since it is likely that many more people were involved. An interesting point of note – Collins was not charged with leaking the photos on the Internet, only obtaining many of them. This suggests it is likely that he distributed the photos to others and someone else leaked them online.
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So how did Collins manage to gain access to so many celebrity accounts?
It was a through a phishing campaign. Collins obtained the email addresses of many celebrities, many of which were easily accessible to the public, and sent them spoof emails pretending to be from Apple, asking them to reset their account passwords. Those emails linked to spoof websites designed to look like the Apple website. Once information is entered into them – such as the password, it went straight to Collins.
Now armed with both the username and password, Collins could access their accounts (which would often store an entire synced backup of their iPhone photos) and then downloaded them to his own computer. Since many of the celebrities had taken nude photos on their phones, these photos were also on their iCloud accounts as well.
We penned an article at the time of the incident about how to take nude photos of yourself without risking (too much) them being leaked online for those partial to that sort of thing, which we recommend giving a read.
Further reading –
3 things we learned from the nude celeb hacking scandal.
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