An American judge has jailed a computer hacker for a decade for breaking into the email accounts of Hollywood stars, including managing to take one topless shot of Scarlett Johansson. The judge also ordered 36-year-old Christopher Chaney to pay $76,000 to Scarlett Johansson, Christina Aguilera and Renee Olstead.
Christopher wasn’t an advanced hacker and he pleaded guilty after a deal with prosecutors. In fact, if he hadn’t made that deal, he could have been jailed for over 120 years on all 26 indictments.
The judge claimed that Chaney’s conduct showed a “callous disregard to the victims”. According to US Attorney, Christopher has gained access to every email sent to almost 50 victims which allowed him to view their private data. Chaney posted dozens of illegally obtained, private pictures online. Although it’s difficult to be sympathetic to the person like Chaney, it seems that he wasn’t found guilty due to his stalking of non-celebrities.
Chaney’s arrest by FBI agents resulted from an 11-month investigation into the hacking of over fifty entertainment industry names. Since the hack and “wire-tapping” allegation was concerned, it turned out that Christopher used open-source, public data to try to guess a celebrity’s email password, and then would breach the account. In other words, it wasn’t so much hacking as guessing and not so much wiretapping as going to victims’ Yahoo or Hotmail page.
After obtaining complete access to the hacked account, the “hacker” then used the contact list to find new targets. This means that once inside one hacked account Chaney looked for other celebrity emails to do the same with them.
The FBI claimed that Chaney’s actions were tantamount to breaking and entering of their private homes by a thief. The only mistake he made was to be targeting Hollywood celebrities who could afford to fight back.
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