Summary: In a different case involving stolen nude photos of celebrities, an Oregon man pleaded guilty to hacking email accounts. Celebgate is still at large.
Celebrities all over are celebrating. The Oregon man that tricked users into handing over passwords to break into accounts to reveal their private, and often nude, photos has pleaded guilty. Twenty-nine-year-old Andrew Helton of Portland, Oregon pleaded guilty to a felony violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
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The specific charge against Helton is unauthorized access to a protected computer to obtain information. He did this by sending “email verification” messages that looked like the source was from Apple or Google. Helton phished logins from 363 Apple and Google email accounts after the users clicked on a link in the email that took them to a site rigged to look like an Apple or Google login page. The users would enter their username and password, in a sense handing over their credentials to Helton.
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He successful obtained 448 logins for 363 email accounts. With this information he was able to do whatever kind of poking around he wanted to do on their accounts. He grabbed 161 sexually explicit, nude, or partially nude images from 13 different users, some of which were celebrities.
Helton is not the famous Celebgate though, the case that involved stole photos of celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence but he did steal the photos before Celebgate. Investigators believe Helton’s scheme ran between March 2011 and May 2013. It is not believed that any of the images Helton took were leaked online.
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The Celebgate case is still being investigated with the house of Emilio Herrera in Chicago being raided by the FBI last June. Another Chicago home was reported to have been raided last month. Another Chicago man has been identified as a suspect but no charges have been filed against anyone.
Helton will spend a maximum of 5 years in jail but it is likely he won’t spend that much time in jail.
Photo: gawker.com