“Celebgate” Hacker Receives Prison Sentence

A word to the wise: don’t violate the privacy of others. Especially when those whose privacy you are violating have the benefit of being famous enough to draw attention to the matter.

If you are unsure of what we are talking about, allow us to wind the clocks back to August of 2014, when a collection of 500 private pictures taken by A-list celebrities such as actress Jennifer Lawrence, supermodel Kate Upton, and The Big Bang Theory actress Kaley Cuoco were illegally obtained through hacking their iCloud accounts. By the end of the month, after prior months of planning and collaborative work executed by hackers, these photos were leaked onto message boards like Reddit by the primary “collector” of these images. From there, the rest of the world begun to notice the leak that would later be known as “Celebgate.” Apple faced heat for its insufficient security measures, blogs devoted weeks of content to the leaks, Internet ethics, and the concept of privacy, and the celebrities victimized found themselves at the center of an unwanted controversy.

Read More: What You Need to Know About Acecard Trojan Malware

That was then, of course. Today, we know that the individual responsible for this gross violation of privacy was a man from Pennsylvania named Ryan Collins. We know this because Collins was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison for his involvement in the hacks (he faced 5 years, but he got a shorter sentence thanks to a plea deal). According to authorities, the 36-year old man pled guilty to a felony hacking charge early in 2016, and used a phishing scheme to get the login credentials of 50 iCloud accounts and 72 Gmail accounts between November 2012 and September 2014 — shortly after nude photographs of Jennifer Lawrence become widely known to the public.

Though Collins himself was not identified as the man responsible for posting these private photos, he did admit he was guilty of the phishing scheme that collected these photos and made the massive leak possible. Still, this publicized event is a reminder that violating the privacy of others through their digital properties is a crime, and even the most covert of criminals will eventually have to answer for their deeds.

While this scheme only targeted celebrity actresses and models that are well-known public figures, such a leak can happen to anyone who stores their data on a cloud-based server. If you don’t want images and media intended for private purposes finding their way onto the Internet without your consent, be sure you carefully manage where you store them. Additionally, to lessen the chance that this happens to you, be sure you use PSafe Total and PSafe Total Windows to keep your digital devices safe from malicious hackers.