Two years after the infamous leakage of nude pictures of celebrities and known personalities, the man responsible for such crime has now been caught and will spend 18 months of his life in federal prison.
The 36-year old hacker, Ryan Collins who is from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, pleaded guilty to a two year phishing scam which allowed him to gain access to usernames, email address, and passwords of over 100 people most of which are female celebrities.
In a report by IB Times, among those unlucky victims were Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Rihanna, Victoria Justice, Ariana Grande, and Avril Lavigne, who suffered emotionally after their nude pictures were leaked on the internet.
In a document found on the United States Attorneys Office, Pennsylvania US attorney Bruce Brandler in his stated that Collins admitted on his testimony by tricking celebrities into giving him their passwords by faking emails that appear to have come from Apple and Google.
"In some instances, Collins would use a software program to download the entire contents of the victims' Apple iCloud backups. In addition, Collins ran a modelling scam in which he tricked his victims into sending him nude photographs", the US attorney said.
All these were in between November 2012 to September 2014 and it was discovered that he had more than 600 victims, of which the investigators said at least 50 iCloud accounts and 72 Gmail accounts were accessed by Collins.
The Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI's Los Angeles Field Office announced that, "By illegally accessing intimate details of his victims' personal lives, Mr Collins violated their privacy and left many to contend with lasting emotional distress, embarrassment and feelings of insecurity."
This has also resulted to the victims and the netizens to quickly criticize Apple for failing to protect their privacy and of the information they stored on their iCloud services which the company responded,"None of the cases we have investigated has resulted from any breach in any of Apple's system's," and that it had suffered "a very targeted attack on usernames, passwords and security cases."
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
