Signalling the conclusion of “Operation Hackerazzi”, a federal judge today sentenced Christopher Chaney, 35, of Jacksonville, Florida to 10 years in prison. Chaney had plead guilty to several counts including wiretapping and unauthorized access to a computer. Chaney allegedly accessed the personal email accounts of more than 50 people in the Hollywood entertainment industry between November 2010 and October 2011. Victims included Scarlett Johansson, Mila Kunis, and Christina Aguilera, who all agreed to have their identities made public with the hopes that the exposure about the case would provide awareness about online intrusion. Chaney did more than snoop through the celebrity’s private email – he grabbed private nude photos of the stars and posted them online. Prior to the “hackerazzi” incident, Chaney reportedly had targeted two women he new, who described him as calculated, cruel and creepy, sending nude photos of one former co-worker to her father.
GQ Magazine described the excitement of Chaney’s first celebrity “find”:
“The hacker’s eyes widened as the image filled his screen. There, without her makeup, stood Scarlett Johansson, her famous face unmistakable in the foreground, her naked backside reflected in the bathroom mirror behind her, a cell phone poised in her hand snapping the shot. Holy shit, he thought. This was a find—even for him. For years, he had stealthily broken into the e-mail accounts of the biggest players in Hollywood. He had daily access to hundreds of messages between his victims and their managers, lawyers, friends, doctors, family, agents, nutritionists, publicists, etc. By now he knew more dirt than almost anyone in L.A.—the secret romances, the hidden identities, films in all stages of development. Still, this photo, a private self-portrait of one of our biggest stars, was something new, something larger than life, especially his. “You feel like you’ve seen something that the rest of the world wanted to see,” he says. “But you’re the only one that’s seen it.”
At the time of his arrest, police found his computer contained numerous private celebrity photos and a document that compiled extensive personal data on each of the stars. Chaney, who had no technical hacking skills, broke into the accounts using the password reset function so commonly found on web-based email websites. Using the IMDB website to look up personal information about the stars, such as the names of their parents and pets, he supplied answers to the password reset “secret question” in order to reset or retrieve the password for the star’s personal email account. Once he broke into the account, he set them up to forward all email to his personal email address so he would continue to receive copies of their communications even if they reset their passwords.
Chaney said that after breaking into several accounts, he would log in to his computer each day to find over 800 email messages waiting for him to read. In one instance, he followed the complete production of a major Hollywood movie (including the full script) from beginning to end. He knew about the celebrity scandals months before the public knew because he was getting his celebrity information real-time. After several months Chaney began soliciting some of the private pictures he had found to scandal-type websites. This marked the beginning of the end for Chaney as the FBI discovered that the celebrity accounts had been compromised and began the investigation to identify and capture him.
