FBI finally arrested the man behind the photo leaks of celebrities
Emilio Herrera allegedly leaked photographs of several Hollywood celebrities last summer and his house was raided in October 2014 by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) officials. The details of the raid were released by the FBI recently and show that the hacks were carried out from the IP address of Herrera.
The hacks were into the iCloud accounts of the celebrities and around 572 accounts were hacked. These accounts were accessed for 3263 times and this was done through the IP address of Herrera. These accounts were accessed in an unauthorised manner between May 2014 and August 2014. Of these 572 accounts, 291 accounts were accessed for over 600 times.
Herrera’s house was raided on 16th October 2014 by the Federal agents who seized computers, mobile phones, hard drives, USB drives, floppy disks, Kindle and other stuff. It is alleged that photos of celebrities such as Hope Solo, Abigail Spencer, Christina Hendricks, Olivia Wilde, Jennette McCurdy, Anna Kendrick, Amber Heard and Emily Browning were accessed. This happened just after a month of the leak of photographs of Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton. The leaked photographs of these two celebrities were posted online.
It is also stated in the report that Herrera is one among the several individuals who are being investigated by the FBI. According to the FBI officials, the hack involved several unconnected individuals who were part of an online network which was used to trade the leaked pictures.
Apple has been severely criticised for these hacking incidents which pose serious questions about the security of the cloud based application of Apple – iCloud. Also, such instances also lead to the doubts about the various cloud based services which are used to store online data of individuals.
