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The hacker who broke into the email accounts of Scarlett Johansson, Christina Aguilera, Mila Kunis and dozens of other celebrities has been identified as an apparently unemployed 35-year-old man living in Jacksonville, Fla., who the FBI said didn’t appear to have done it for money even though several allegedly pilfered images wound up on celebrity websites. From his personal computer, the L.A. Times reported, Christopher Chaney allegedly scoured celebrity magazines, websites and Twitter and Facebook posts to glean email addresses and password clues from the names of friends, children, siblings, pets or any seemingly innocuous personal information. Beginning in November 2010, the FBI said, Chaney hacked as many as 50 victims, many of them from electronic address books. Even if he didn’t try to sell information or photos or try to blackmail his targets, it’s way creepy, and if convicted Chaney faces up to 120 years in prison.
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120 years!?! Wonder what hacking civilians gets ya.
Or is that even penalized?
it gets you a job at the cia, my friend.
I was thinking the SAME thing!
This guy has got to be a pretty good detective to manage to hack someone’s account based on Us Magazine press clippings. I’m impressed.
This could make a good premise for a drama series.
i realize im going to be demonized for saying this, but the fact is that this guy has a VALUABLE skillset coupled with patience.
Hes a nonviolent offender who will be out pretty quickly and then be able to get contract work.
CIA? maybe. Ace Tomato Co. (or some innocuous “go away nothing to see here company name”) of Maclean, VA? probably.
This could have been leveraged differently by him for a better result.
While I see your logic, the guy is a severely disturbed dude with an abusive track record. He has stalked several non-celebrity women for years, causing a great deal of anxiety and pain. He would repeatedly take over one particular woman’s email accounts and send completely inappropriate emails to her other female friends. Once he forwarded nude pictures she’d intended for her boyfriend to her brother just because she’d asked him to stop. He stalked this woman for over 9 years.
This does not sound like a “nonviolent offender” to me, it sounds like an obsessive abuser, and I personally don’t want him anywhere the internet until he gets some serious help.
source:
victim’s original post
follow up upon his arrest
Exactly. No way he will sit in a cell for 1 year with those skills, man…..
I think we need the mila kunis pics released as evidence
I have to be kidding.Thats just gross.
So hacking is worse than rape now?!? America is a strange country.
S.J. is stolen biological material, taken against will and formed to clones line 200 pieces total. Sign of dangerous criminal activity. Original Scarlett Galabekian educated and licensed pediatrician doctor
No, you are forgetting the second tray and background radiation. We are Russians but we are educated. Not clone essence.
My friend, you are not to telling people this news, reeducation corps of proletariat to coming and pick you up now. Smile for their friendly.
So you can sit at home and figure out how to hack into a celebrity’s phone? You don’t need to pay off the pool boy at the Chateau Marmont to swipe ScarJo’s phone when she goes to the ladies room? That’s insane. And I’m not sure I believe it.
These celebrities used brilliant, unbreakable passwords like ‘name of pet + 123′. The guy just put in some time guessing. Same with News Corp.
Then you don’t know how computers work.
The article didn’t mention hacking into a phone, it talked about hacking into emails. And that is as easy as figuring out the password through trial and error. I bet he targeted dozens of celebrities, but because of the complexity involved in randomly guessing a person’s password by plugging in names of pets and so forth, he only succeeded with two targets.
Wonder what the girl w the dragon tatoo would say about this.
Let’s get this right:
He didn’t do this in order to find out where they live, stalk them, and kill them.
He did it to look through their phones, find other attractive celebrities, and try to see if they stupidly had naked images of themselves (or others).
The real lessons here:
1. Have smarter passwords
2. Delete your incidental media
3. Change your passwords regularly
4. Repeat as mantra, “I may be famous, but I am not better than everyone else.
Scarlett ought to be paying him, not prosecuting him. This is the most she’s been talked about since her last scandal. When was the last time anyone talked about one of her performances?
120 years?! Why wont they execute the guy? He is worse than Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden combined. Hope Johansson and the other ones will sleep calmly.
How about 4 years?
What harm did he do really?
It’s like War Games, but way more important.
i think the creepiest thing about this is that he wasn’t trying to make a buck off what seems like a lot of hard work.
People don’t even get 120 years for murder in this country, how crazy is this. Give him a job with the FBI or CIA and make him do some kind of community service and call it a day. Sending him to an already overcrowded prison is a waste of taxpayers’ money.
I don’t know the full details, but maybe the pics were taken by her phone but he hacked into her mobile me accnt or something? It does seem peculiar that you can hack into someone’s phone hundreds of miles away…
If you pick a security question like “what was the name of your high school” and then do an interview in which you give your old high school a shout out, someone doesn’t need elite hacker skills to get access to your email.
It’s the same thing that happened when that college kid got access to Sarah Palin’s email account. This isn’t like Chloe from 24 busting through firewalls and getting access to the “mainframe” of some corporation.
120 years?! If any of those celebs were to commit first degree murder they wouldn’t even get that sentence.
“It’s way creepy”?!?!?! Could you folks at least pretend to sound professional, and not like some 17 year old girl writing a blog about how tough high school is?? You’re supposed to be a professional, accountable, respectable authority on the entertainment industry – act like it…
If he had raped her, he would’ve been convicted for less time.
Who knew that rapists get off easier than a man merely doing all of us a public service, this is the America we live in!!! For shame!!!
It’s really not hacking if you have the password. Still messed up and illegal, but not hacking. He just found the key under the mat.
……why aren’t the Murdoch’s arrested for the same behavior?
120 years!!! Americans are strange