Celebrity Nudes Whodunnit

Today the internet is all a-buzz with the news that a hundred or so celebrity’s personal photo accounts were hacked. Tonight it’s all about indignation, tomorrow will come the speculation about how this could occur.

Make no bones about it, this is a massive privacy breach and on a scale I’m not sure we’ve seen before. Particularly when you account for the personal nature of the photos and the sheer number of celebrities affected. Given that, someone will want to say they were the first to get it right, and that includes yours truly.

First, let’s dispense with what this is not. I have a gut feeling this is not an iCloud exploit, as most suspect (UPDATE: Apple now confirms this). This is certainly not some nation-state effort. It is on that scale but that would be ridiculous – even the most fervent jihadist has better things to do. I also don’t believe that some script kiddie could pull this off, it is way too big. Maybe a ring of script kiddies? I doubt that too and like the jihadists, an individual with the skills to pull this off would have found a more profitable way to distribute the images. That is unless that person had some account information already, making the job much easier.

If you recall it wasn’t that long ago that it was uncovered that Russian hackers has amassed a collection of more than 1 billion account credentials. My bet is that someone spent time going through that list and found access to the hacked celebrity accounts.

Occam’s Razor.