Apple iCloud Security Ping!
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14. On the topic of OPSEC. Tracking down one of the distributors who was posting ransomed private images to 4chan and reddit was simple. He (Bryan Hamade—swordmaker) posted a screenshot as part of pitching the sale of 60 or more images and videos for a single celebrity but didn’t black out his machine name or the machine names of the other computers on his local network. A user on reddit did a Google search and tracked down the company he worked for (although they picked the wrong employee). Tracking each of those names linked one of them back to a reddit account that had posted a screenshot of the exact same explorer interface (the guy had a bad habit of taking screenshots of his own machine). He has denied being the source of the images, but he is definitely a distributor who purchased them from within the network since the ransomed set he posted were all images that did not and have not yet leaked.
edit: Turns out Maroney was underage when these pictures were taken, which means this screenshot is an admission of posesssion of child pornography. Reddit mods on the fappening sub are desperately asking users to remove any images of her and other underage celebrities.
15. I personally don’t distinguish between somebody who stole the data directly and somebody else who “only” bought that data with the intention of selling it for a profit to the public.
16. It seems to have gone wrong for not only our identified friend but a lot of other members of this network over the past few days. It appears the intention was to never make these images public, but that somebody – possibly the previously identified distributor – decided that the opportunity to make some money was too good to pass up and decided to try to sell some of the images. The first post from this set that I could track down was nearly 5 days to the story becoming public, on the 26th of August. Each of those posts was a censored image with a request for an amount of money for an uncensored version. After numerous such posts and nobody paying attention to it (thinking it was a scam) the person behind the posts began publishing uncensored versions, which quickly propagated on anon-ib, 4chan and reddit. My theory is that other members of the ring, seeing the leaks and requests for money also decided to attempt to cash in thinking the value of the images would soon approach zero, which lead to a race to the bottom between those who had access to them.
All it proves to me is how stupid most celebrities are
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BTTT
This sort of thing happens to people all the time, when vindictive ex-lovers or jealous haters post nude photos of people (both male and female), just to hurt their reputations. But you only hear about it when it happens to celebrities and they start whining in public about it. Here is a word to the wise: if you don’t want nude photos of yourself to be circulated on social media, then don’t put nude photos of yourself on the computer. Duh!
I’m even more in love with Jennifer Lawrence than I was already.
This proves once and for all: the cloud is not a safe place to store sensitive data.
No one seems to be talking about this in the larger media; I guess it doesn't fit the narrative.