Christopher Chaney, the man who hacked into several celebrity email accounts to retrieve nude photos and other personal information in order to distribute it, has received his sentence: restitution in the amount of $150,000 and five years in jail.
Chaney allegedly made his way into the email accounts with little problem by simply using the “I forgot my password” feature and looking up stars’ personal info on Google. The photos he found of Johansson were supposedly meant for her then-husband Ryan Reynolds; he will be made to pay her $66,000 of the restitution for her troubles.
The hacker also stole info from Christina Aguilera, Mila Kunis, and several high profile Hollywood actors who were gay but hiding it for their careers. He then sent that information to celebrity gossip sites, but says his motivation wasn’t to make money. Rather, he was initially looking for location information for producers and location scouts working on films, as he is a “movie fanatic”. But being privy to secrets of the stars did appeal to him.
“You feel like you’ve seen something that the rest of the world wanted to see. But you’re the only one that’s seen it. I don’t want to compare it to throwing a touchdown pass… but it was a rush,” he said.
Celebrities aren’t the only ones in danger of getting hacked, and if it’s that easy for someone who had no experience in computers to get into private email accounts, we should all beef up our security a bit.