Two men in the US are facing up to 15 years in federal prison in connection to the development of a piece of software that was able to automatically hack into the private online photo albums of women and steal their naked photos.
Deborah Ann Woll – True Blood S07E05 & S04E12

Deborah Ann Woll

Brandon Bourret and Athanasios Andrianakis were arrested Friday and accused of creating a piece of software named “Photofucket” that looks through private online photo albums on the photo-sharing site Photobucket. They have not yet responded to the charges. The US Department of Justice cautions that “the charges contained in the indictment are allegations and the defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.”
Lots of people use Photobucket to host personal photographs online. It was acquired by MySpace in 2007 for $250 million but eventually sold off to a Seattle-based company in 2010. Though it is less popular than it once was, a lot of people still have photos on the site because they used it for MySpace, while others still use it as a handy place to store their photographs online and share them with others.

A giant cache of photos from around the world is an attractive target for hackers. There are plenty of forums online where people buy and sell tools to search through private photos in search of naked women. But most of those tools — like the ones used in a mass release of naked celebrity photos called “the fappening” — require users to hack each account manually.
Bourret and Andrianakis are accused of developing Photofucket so it would isolate hidden photographs automatically.
BlogsDNA
The tool works by “fusking” URLs to expose links to private photos. Fusking is the act of locating a website or account that you know is on the web, and then guessing URL addresses that branch off it until you find pages that are not supposed to be seen. The tool tries lots of different URLs automatically — by sequentially changing plausible dates or numbers in the original URL — until it discovers links to photos that are on the web but posted in a location that is otherwise private.
Here’s what it looks like when you run the tool on a person’s account in search of photos:

Fusking, however, isn’t a new exploit. In fact, it has been a known security issue for years. BuzzFeed wrote about Photobucket fuskers back in 2012. Photobucket has tried to shut down fuskers by implementing levels of security, which appears to have infuriated the hackers who were trying to find naked photos.
Emails that the Department of Justice says were sent between Bourret and Andrianakis show a constant fight against the site’s increased security:
U.S. Department of Justice
Developing the hacking software was just the first step, though. To make money off an exploit, hackers need to find a willing buyer. Luckily for hacker developers, there are several online forums dedicated to stealing photos of women and sharing advice on how to do it.
One of the most famous forums used by hackers to find porn is called AnonIB. You might recognise that name — it’s the website where photos of naked celebrities first surfaced after a user named “Originalguy” posted his collection of photographs stolen from Apple’s iCloud. That collection quickly spread to the anarchic bulletin board forum 4chan, then to Reddit, as stars like Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton saw their private photographs posted online.
Niche porn forums have discussed Photobucket exploits for years, but Photofucket managed to monetise that interest by automating the process and marketing the software directly to porn forums.
The basic version of the product was available free, but the developers charged $29.99 for a fully upgraded version that could retrieve passwords and automatically scan user profiles.