Who is christopher chaney

James Otero sentenced year-old Christopher Chaney after hearing from a tearful Johansson in a videotaped statement. The case included the revelation that nude photos taken by Johansson of herself and meant for her then-husband Ryan Reynolds were leaked online.

Prosecutors said Chaney also targeted two women he knew, sending nude pictures of one former co-worker to her father. The judge noted the damage to the women was in some ways worse than what Chaney's celebrity victims endured. The women, identified in court filings only by initials, wrote in letters to Otero that their lives were irreparably damaged by Chaney's actions. One has anxiety and panic attacks; the other is depressed and paranoid.

So how exactly did a man that didn't know an ounce of code, and had only owned a computer for a few years, gain access to celebrities' private emails and photographs?

With a lot of time, and very little effort. Chaney's method was painfully simple. He entered full celebrity names into Gmail's login field until he got a hit, and then retrieved the lost passwords by researching the answers to security questions on IMDb. Within months Cheney had access to thousands of emails, and, unsurprisingly, hundreds of illicit images.

You can find the full story of Chaney's fascinating rise and fall at the source link below. Subscribe to get the best Verge-approved tech deals of the week.

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By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. And I was in that little sliver of privacy they do have. Kim Zetter is an award-winning, senior staff reporter at Wired covering cybercrime, privacy, and security. She is writing a book about Stuxnet, a digital weapon that was designed to sabotage Iran's nuclear program.

Chaney admitted he hacked into the personal emails of his targets by clicking on the "forgot password" feature of their accounts and answering security questions by using publicly available information about celebrities that he found on the internet. Once in control of the accounts, he obtained private photos, business contracts, scripts, and other documents.

He also went through contacts lists to find other victims and sometimes posed as friends to request more private photos. Chaney then forwarded many of the images he found, including nude photos of Johansson, to gossip websites which posted them online. Johansson told Vanity Fair last December that the photos were meant for her then-husband Ryan Reynolds.