A little over two years ago, many Hollywood celebrities saw a large number of personal photos run freely on the internet, an event that was quickly dubbed the #celebgate. Quickly the The FBI arrested the perpetrators of the hack to the celebrities and it was shown that Apple had not been at fault in this attack, since the passwords used by the hackers had been provided by celebrities, when responding to emails that impersonated the identity of the Cupertino-based company and where they were asked for the access code.
Last September, Edward Majerczyk, a 29-year-old Chicago native, pleaded guilty to the theft of photographs of a large number of celebrities. A few days ago the trial was held, in which he has been sentenced to 9 months in prison for the phishing attacks he carried out on more than 300 accounts, both iCloud and Gmail, many of them celebrities. Once they had access to the email account, they could also access the photos stored in iCloud. He has also been sentenced to pay a fine of $ 5.700 to an unidentified victim and to pay the costs of the trial that have amounted to $ 11.400.
Although Majerczyk acknowledged his authorship in stealing passwords from more than 300 people, but he assures that he was not involved in the publication and distribution on the internet of the stolen photographs and videos. In the first place, they began to circulate on the Dark web, to later begin to be distributed through torrent files and forums as popular as 4chan. Majerczyk is the second person charged in this scandal. The first to go to prison was Ryan Collins from Pennsylvania, who pleaded guilty to accessing 50 iCloud and 72 Gmail accounts through phishing emails. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison.