Man admits he stole nude celebrity pics from Apple and Gmail accounts
Phishing scheme gained illegal access to accounts storing 161 nude images.
Teresa Palmer
Hacker Who Stole Nude Photos of Celebrities Pleads Guilty
Andrew Helton, a 29-year-old hacker from Astoria, Oregon, has been successfully prosecuted for stealing over 150 nude photos of celebrities, and may be sentenced up to five years in prison.
Andrew Helton has admitted he tricked hundreds of people into divulging their Apple and Gmail passwords in a scheme that allowed him to steal nude images of more than a dozen victims, some of them celebrities.
Carly Pope
Andrew Helton entered the plea on Thursday to one felony count of unauthorized access to a protected computer to obtain information, according to documents filed in federal court in Los Angeles. Prosecutors said he gained illegal access to 363 Apple and Gmail accounts, including those belonging to members of the entertainment industry in Los Angeles. He then used the access to obtain data stored in the online accounts, including 161 sexually explicit, nude, or partially nude images of 13 people, some who were unidentified celebrities.
Victoria Justice
According to the FBI, the case does not appear to be directly related to the “Fappening” incident in 2014, in which hundreds of nude photos of various female celebrities were released online and then disseminated through various social networks including 4chan and Reddit.
However, Helton managed to break into 363 separate email accounts, obtaining 448 usernames and passwords and 161 “sexually explicit, nude or partially nude images of about a dozen victims, some of whom were celebrities,” reported Deadline. He pleaded guilty to federal charges of illegally accessing a protected computer system on Thursday.
Joy Corrigan
To get access to the accounts, Helton ran a classic “phishing” scam, sending emails to potential victims purporting to be from Apple or Google and linking to doctored web pages where he would ask them to enter their email passwords. Once he was inside the accounts, he would search them for the private images.
While online dissemination of pornography featuring people who have not given their consent for the content to be shared is nothing new, it is only recently that either major corporations like Google or law enforcement have taken the phenomenon seriously.
“Given how hostile the online world already is for women, the threat of real — or fake — naked photos hangs over all our heads as women,” Mic’s Elizabeth Plank wrote in 2014 amid the “Fappening” fiasco. “It happened to Jennifer Lawrence and more than 100 female celebrities earlier this month, and it happened again this week to Kim Kardashian and numerous other high-profile women. It also occurs much more regularly for the thousands of women who are victims of revenge porn and have little or no effective legal recourse with which to go after their abusers.”
Bar Refaeli