The FBI nowadays under arrest a Florida man accuse of hacking into e-mail accounts of Scarlett Johansson, Christina Aguilera, and dozens of other celebrities, and release stolen photos of them to the Web.
Establishment arrested Christopher Chaney, 35, of Jacksonville, Fla., as part of an 11-month investigation officials dub “Operation Hackerazzi,” according to a declaration from the FBI in Los Angeles.
The 26-count indictment, unsealed the past, charges Chaney with unauthorized right of entry of protected computers, wiretapping, identity theft, and damaging computers. He faces as much as 120 years in prison if convicted of all charges. official said they will likely request he be transfer to Los Angeles to face trial.
While officials said they had recognized more than 50 victims, only five were recognized by name: Johansson, Aguilera, Kuni, Simone Harouche, and Renee Olstead. Six other alleged victims were identified by initials: B.P., J.A., L.B., L.S., D.F., and B.G.The FBI alleges that Chaney mined unnamed public sources for information about the victims and used aliases, including “trainreqsuckswhat” and “anonygrrl,” to gain manage of their e-mail accounts. It’s not clear precisely how that was talented.
Chaney allegedly found extra victims from the address book on the compromise computers, used victim’s identities to access computers, intercept e-mails, and had e-mails that were sent to victims automatically forward to an account he forbidden, according to the indictment. “This form of wiretapping allowed Chaney to repeatedly receive victims’ e-mails even after a password had been reset,” the FBI said.
He also is accuse of distribute some of the photos and other information from the compromised accounts to celebrity blog sites, and as a result, some of the fabric ended up on the Web, officials said. The FBI confirmed to CNET that an investigation was underway last month after nude photos of Johansson appear on a celebrity news site. While Johansson and other victims had photos and other information stolen, another celebrity allegedly had sensitive financial data exposed to the world. Someone posted hip hop artist P Diddy’s credit card number, passport information, and phone numbers online, according to celebrity blog TMZ.
There have been other cases of celebrities getting accounts hacked, including Paris Hilton, whose Sidekick mobile phone was compromise and phone numbers of her celebrity contacts were posted to the Internet.