A man accused of hacking into a number of PCs and other devices owned by over 50 people, including celebrities like Scarlett Johansson, Christina Aguilera and Mila Kunis, was arrested today. CNN.com reports that 35 year old Christopher Chaney of Jacksonville, Florida was indited on 26 hacking related charges, including accessing protected computers without authorization, damaging protected computers, wiretapping and aggravated identity theft and more.
The FBI claims that Chaney was able to break into his victims' PCs by checking out the web sites and social networking services that were used by the people he attacked. Using information gathered by checking out those sites, along with public sources, allowed Chaney to allegedly gather clues to his target's user names and passwords. Once he broke into the PCs of his victims, he allegedly stole items like financial info, privately logged conversations, movie scripts and, yes, nude photos. U.S. Attorney Andre Birotte Jr said, "Unfortunately, Mr. Chaney was able to access nude photos of some of the celebrities and some of them were uploaded on the Internet." Chaney is also accused of forwarding emails from his targets to his own email account.
Chaney was arrested as part of an FBI investigation that was called (no, we are not making this up) Operation Hackerazzi, which targets hackers who specifically go after people in the entertainment industry. If he is convicted of all 26 counts, Chaney could be facing a total of 121 years in federal prison.
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