As you may have heard, the guy who alleged hacked into the emails of numerous celebrities including Scarlett Johansson, Mila Kunis and Christina Aguilera — and famously released nude pics of the lovely Scarlett (the pic above absolutely mesmerizes me) onto the web — was arrested in Florida (OF COURSE!) yesterday. Reading an article on the arrest, I was particularly struck by how Christopher Chaney did it: according to the FBI indictment, he didn’t use any fancy hacking equipment. Rather, he made really good educated guesses.
According to the FBI, Chaney was able to get into celebrities’ emails by using publicly available information to guess passwords and security questions.
Not all of the alleged victims are named in the indictment, but a few are, including Johansson, Mila Kunis, Simone Harouche, Christina Aguilera, and Renee Olstead.
The indictment states Chaney gained access to the email accounts of more than 50 people and then set up their email accounts to automatically forward him all of their messages.
Apparently, Chaney was quite the obsessive, spending countless hours pouring through celebrity magazines, gossip websites, celebrity tweets and Facebook posts to try to gather information about the names of celebrities’ pets, siblings, children, friends, etc. — anything that could possibly tip him off to what their email address, passwords and email security question answers might be. Oh, and here’s what he looks like…
When you really stop and think about it, this guy, if the allegations against him are true, had to have devoted hundreds, hell, thousands of hours of his life to his cause. Can you imagine how overjoyed he must have been when he finally struck gold and was able to get inside one? Ever better, can you imagine the joy he must have experienced when he discovered the ScarJo nudie pics in her account?! He probably danced the night away like this fat kid…
I hope inspiring the Scarlett Johanssoning meme and giving a few dudes some fapping material was worth 121 years in prison.