Hacker jailed for stealing nude celebrity photos from iCloud accounts
The man behind "celebgate" is going to jail for 18 months.
The Justice Department announced on Thursday that 36-year-old Pennsylvania resident Ryan Collins was sentenced after he obtained "illegal access of over 100 Apple and Google e-mail accounts," many of which belonged to celebrities.
He had faced a possible five-year prison sentence and a fine of $250,000.
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The story made headlines for days toward the end of 2014 after nude images and videos of celebrities were leaked online.
“I can't even describe to anybody what it feels like to have my naked body shoot across the world like a news flash against my will," Jennifer Lawrence, one of the most famous actresses whose nude images were stolen and uploaded, told Vanity Fair in an article published in November, 2014. "It just makes me feel like a piece of meat that's being passed around for a profit.”
Lawerence, Kim Kardashian, Rihanna, Hope Solo, Gabrielle Union, Scarlet Johansson, Kate Upton, Hillary Duff, Jenny McCarthy, Victoria Justice and many more celebrities had their various accounts hacked, though the Justice Department said it found no "evidence linking Collins to the actual leaks or that Collins shared or uploaded the information he obtained."
The DOJ made no mention of how the images were revealed to the public.
Collins used phishing emails to get a hold of usernames and passwords for the celebrities he hacked, and did so over an almost two-year period that ended in early September, 2014.
He fired off emails that tricked celebrities and others into thinking those emails came from Google and Apple, then had those people fill out passwords. From there, he dug around for images and videos and sometimes downloaded entire iCloud accounts.
Investigators determined his hacks involved more than 600 people, and many of them made their livelihoods in the "entertainment industry in Los Angeles."
Edward Majerczyk, 28, from Illinois pled guilty to taking part in the celebgate hacking in September, according to a separate DOJ statement. But the agency didn't find evidence that he had uploaded the images online, either. He will be sentenced in January, 2017.
Collins' sentence is significantly lighter than the man behind a similar scheme who was sentenced to jail in 2012.
Florida resident Christopher Chaney could have been sentenced to up to 121 years in prison for illegally accessing email accounts of around 50 celebrities, doing so by stalking their social media accounts to figure out what their passwords might be.
He was arrested in 2011 and sentenced to a decade behind bars the following year. Notably, in Chaney's case, law enforcement also proved that he posted nude images of celebrities online.
Topics Apple Cybersecurity Google Celebrities
Colin is Mashable's US & World Reporter. He previously interned at Foreign Policy magazine and The American Prospect. Colin is a graduate from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. When he's not at Mashable, you can most likely find him eating or playing some kind of sport.
