Unsealed documents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation have revealed that the organization raided the home of a Chicago man in connection with the theft of thousands of nude photos from the iCloud accounts of hundreds of celebrities last year.
The FBI used IP addresses and phone records to track the man, eventually being led to the home of 30-year-old Emilio Herrera. As a result of the investigation, Herrera's computers were seized in October, as were a number of phones, memory cards, a tablet and even two floppy disks.
It's important to note that the raiding of Herrera's home does not necessarily make him a suspect, and the investigation by the FBI is ongoing. No charges have been made against Herrera at this time. Despite this, the evidence against him does seem pretty compelling, with FBI records suggesting that Herrera's computer was used to access 572 different iCloud accounts six times each. His computer was also used to reset the passwords of as many as 2,000 other iCloud accounts.
Not only that, but the majority of the accounts accessed by Herrerra's computer were those of celebrities, models and the families of those people. A number of them were the accounts of those hacked last year.
While the FBI did not name which victims were linked to Herrera's computer, they did offer initials, including C.H., H.S., O.W., A.K., E.B. and A.H. A separate report also includes the initials J.L.
According to those interviewed by the FBI, a number of the celebrities took some of the photos with the intention of sending them only to their significant others, but all of the photos ended up being uploaded to their respective iCloud accounts. A few of the celebrities interviewed also remember a brief period of time in which they were locked out of their iCloud accounts, some of whom even disabled their accounts after this time. Others remember receiving phishing emails in which they were tricked into giving their passwords to someone.
The story first broke during Labor Day weekend in 2014, with celebrities including the likes of Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton and others being targeted in the largest celebrity hacking scandal in history. Images were first leaked onto 4chan and then spread to Reddit.
"It is not a scandal. It is a sex crime. It is a sexual violation. It's disgusting. The law needs to be changed, and we need to change. That's why these Web sites are responsible," said Jennifer Lawrence in a Vanity Fair interview.
