Has the hacker behind the massive celebrity nude photo leak been identified? Reddit users who have been trying to get to the bottom of the mystery believes that the individual who had hacked into the iCloud accounts of several celebrities, including those of Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton and others, is a software engineer from Georgia.
Buzzfeed noted that an image shared on the site pointed to one Lawrenceville resident Bryan Hamade. According to the users, Hamade was identified because of the personal information he failed to scrub from the screenshot of the network drives of the leaker. The users claim that the information found on the leaker's drives were suspiciously exact to the information on his old Reddit screenshot.
This is the image that was posted as proof.
Hamade has since went on record to Buzzfeed to deny that he was the one who had hacked celebrities' phones and published the leak. He also feigned innocence of such act, and established that he doesn't hack accounts.
He told the site, "I am not behind this. It was so stupid - I saw a lot of people posting the actual leaks and bitcoin addresses and I've read a lot about bitcoin and how they are valuable and I thought, oh cool I'll get free bitcoins. I am just an idiot who tried to pull one over on 4chan and lost big time and stupidly left this identifying information. They took my proof and back traced it -- it isn't remotely true. I am not a hacker. I have no idea how the hell someone could hack into all those accounts."
According to him, he is trying to find a decent lawyer to defend himself and his family, as he claimed to have been harassed by people nonstop since the allegedly fake comparison post was published.
CNN said that if Hamade would be found guilty, he has two things on his side -- at the moment, U.S. law is just catching up to what is being referred to as the act of unauthorized publishing of explicit consent, or broadly termed "revenge porn." The news agency said that majority of the sites like 4chan are protected by a federal law that allows them to be free of responsibility for content published by third parties, in this case, the celebrities themselves. Moreover, only 12 states in the country have actual laws that criminalize such acts. Also, there is the issue of trying to find out who the perpetrator is, and whether he or she is the right person to prosecute.
A spokeswoman on Monday has since confirmed that the "Hunger Games" actress has since contacted authorities to investigate the leak, Reuters reported.
- Contribute to this Story:
- Send us a tip
- Send us a photo or video
- Suggest a correction
