Christopher Chaney Charged for Celebrity Nude Photos

Christopher Chaney, a 35 year old man from Jacksonville, Florida, has been arrested for hacking into the e-mail accounts of Scarlett Johansson, Mila Kunis, and other celebrities. Sensitive information like movie scripts, personal information, and nude photos of the celebrities were obtained by Chaney.

According to federal prosecutors, Christopher Chaney acquired personal information about targeted celebrities to break into their e-mail accounts. After getting access into their accounts, hosted by Google, Yahoo!, and Apple, he activated the forwarding feature. After activating the forward feature he transferred all the new messages to another account, which was under his control.

Other celebrities who were targeted by Christopher Chaney included designer Simone Harouche, actress Renee Olstead, and singer Christina Aguilera.

He was charged after partially nude photos of Scarlett Johansson appeared on the Internet. One of the pictures showed Johansson wearing only a towel and her image reflecting in the mirror and in the other image suggested she was topless. During a press conference, FBI officials informed that the leaked pictures of the celebrity were connected to Chaney.

Prosecutors did not disclose how Chaney accessed the e-mail accounts of the celebrities, but it is not a new thing too. These kinds of hackers use personal information of the targeted person to gain access to their sensitive information, which is stored online.

In 2008, Sarah Palin’s Yahoo! account was hacked by the son of a Tennessee representative from Democratic state. David Kernel used information that was available publicly to break into the accounts of Sarah Palin. Sarah’s birth date and the location where she met her spouse was the only information Kernell needed to reset her Yahoo! password and access her account.

In the accusation, Scarlett Johansson, Mila Kunis, Christina Aguilera, Renee Olstead, and Simone Harouche were explicitly named as victims. There were also other victims who were referred only by their first and last initials, which included B.P., B.G., D.F., L.S., L.B., D.F., and J.A.

There has been no evidence that Chaney worked for the website where the pictures were published. According to reports, there had been several celebrities who claimed that their accounts were hacked, but it is not sure whether these account hackings were all related to Chaney or not.

If Chaney is charged guilty, he will be sentenced to 121 years of imprisonment in Federal prison. He was arrested by the Florida FBI without any incident under an 11 month old investigation called Operation Hackerazzi.