Celebrity Nude Photo Hack: Almost 600 Accounts Hacked, FBI Investigates Chicago Residence
In 2014, private celebrity photos were hacked and shared all over the Internet. Further research into the hack details that almost 600 accounts could have been hacked, E! Online reports.
NBC News obtained unsealed federal documents that show that almost 600 online storage accounts could have been hacked. Some of these accounts contained nude images of celebrities.
After the Labor Day weekend discovery of private photos of female celebrities such as Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Kirsten Dunst and Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting, the FBI launched an investigation to find out who was behind the hacks.
Back in October, the FBI investigated an address on the South Side of Chicago. They used phone records and IP address data to discover that the hacked celebrity user names had been accessed by a computer linked to two e-mail addresses that belonged to 30-year-old Emilio Herrera.
Even though Herrera was linked to the hack, he was not named as a suspect in the FBI affadavit. According to NBC News, "IP and email addresses can be masked or spoofed through a variety of technologies, and Internet data can be routed through third-party computers without their owners' knowledge using any of a number of software packages."
Herrera is identified in the documents, but he still is not a suspect since he may not have known that the accounts were being hacked through his IP address.
Still, investigators decided to obtain a warrant to search Herrera's home. There are no details on what they have found yet.
The FBI details that almost 2,500 iCloud accounts were targeted. The affidavit says that the computer address belonging to Herrera was used to hack into 572 accounts, each on average of about six times. Additionally, Herrera's computer access was also used to reset 1,987 iCloud passwords in almost 5,000 attempts.
Apple initially said that the attack was not the fault of iCloud's security settings; rather, it was a targeted attack on user names and passwords.
"A number of them were accounts of celebrities who had photos leaked online," the affidavit states.
Additionally, most of the photos belonged to either celebrities, models or their families.
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