It is the hottest leak since Bradley Manning got busted. An anonymous hacker claims to have hacked iCloud accounts for a number of celebrities, including Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Victoria Justice, Ariana Grande, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and several other stars. The hacker clims he has nude photos from these iCloud accounts, and is starting to leak them online.
While some of the celebs he claims to have nudes of have come forward to say that the pics are fakes, not everyone is so lucky, including Jennifer Lawrence.
A spokesperson for Jennifer Lawrence gave a statement to Huffington Post, saying, “This is a flagrant violation of privacy. The authorities have been contacted and will prosecute anyone who posts the stolen photos of Jennifer Lawrence.”
However, something seems to be amiss since the L.A. Police Department claims to have no knowledge of the whole situation. It might all sound like a case of a hoax, with Lawrence’s reps playing along for the publicity, but we can confirm that the pics have indeed been posted on Imgur.
Another celeb is also confirming her own pics’ authenticity, Mary Elizabeth Winstead.
“To those of you looking at photos I took with my husband years ago in the privacy of our home, hope you feel great about yourselves,” she said. “Knowing those photos were deleted long ago, I can only imagine the creepy effort that went into this. Feeling for everyone who got hacked.”
To those of you looking at photos I took with my husband years ago in the privacy of our home, hope you feel great about yourselves.
— Mary E. Winstead (@M_E_Winstead) August 31, 2014
And that is how this sort of thing happens. People take nude pictures, then delete them from their devices, not realizing that their devices are uploading them to iCloud accounts or syncing them across other devices. This is not a flaw, it is how iCloud and other such sync services are designed to work.
The moral of the story here is simple: never take a nude photo with any device that can be connected to the Internet in any way. In fact, the better course is to do what The Boss suggests.
Bruce Springsteen tells the story of a photographer girlfriend who was shooting a private photo session with him. Jokingly, Bruce started peeling off his clothes. His girlfriend stopped him with a warning: Never strip for photos, no matter how much you trust the photographer. As the years go by, you never know where those shots may end up, and how.