Man posted nude photos from women's hacked email

George Bronk, 23, pled guilty for hacking his way into thousands of women's email accounts, grabbing any nude photos he found, and posting them to their Facebook profile pages. "In one case he persuaded a victim to send him even more explicit photographs by threatening to post the ones he'd stolen if she didn't," according to IDG. He's facing up to six years in prison for felony hacking, child pornography and identity theft. "Man Stole Nude Photos From Women's E-mail Accounts" (Thanks, Jason Weisberger!)

• [Anonymous]

  Pics or it didn’t happen

• [Lt. Col. w00t]

  …Christ, what an asshole.

• [Anonymous]

  Pics or it didn’t happen

• [Anonymous]

  So wait, the women that produced the “child pornography” (which may include nude-but-nonsexual pictures of themselves) aren’t prosecuted? Seems rather inconsistent and improper of our indiscriminate NO SEX/NUDITY EVAR-influenced legal system to not prosecute people doing naughty things when there’s evidence of it.

  • [uxb]

    “So wait, the women that produced the “child pornography” (which may include nude-but-nonsexual pictures of themselves) aren’t prosecuted?”

    I believe the cp was found on the guy’s computer when they raided his house and is unrelated to the “hacked” email/facebook accounts.

• [l’elk!]

  he then posted a screen cap of the facebook nudes on /b/?

• [lyd]

  “This case highlights the fact that anyone with an email account is vulnerable to identity theft,”California Attorney General Kamala Harris said in a statement.

  Huh. I thought it highlighted the fact that “security questions” are insecure.

  • [lyd]

    My linking failed, somehow.

    http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/03/secret_question_1.html

    http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/03/secret_question_1.html

• [p96]

  This is why my dog’s name is mm^pHIat7edr.

• [Boondocker]

  This is why I only e-mail ASCII nudes of myself.

• [Brainspore]

  I wonder what the “hit” rate for finding nude photos in email is. Either the average female computer user is kinkier than I thought or he must have had to slog through thousands of boring messages for every nekkid photo he found.

  • [mjpw]

    The article says that he found nude or semi-nude photos in 172 out of 3,200 of the accounts he hacked. That works out to about 5.3 percent.

    • [Anonymous]

      The other factor to consider is that he was choosing the accounts based on their facebook pages rather than randomly selecting them. This implies a couple of things: They were probably attractive, you get to pick them based on their profile pictures (and therefore the pictures they’re likely to have in their email), and they have an open profile and probably don’t know much about security settings.

      5% is surprisingly high and it’s because he picked his target group well. After he broke into the facebook account, he’d be home and dry for a limited period. If you’ve had the foresight to set up a fake account for things like facebook, you better not have set your real account as the ‘forgotten password reset’ email. You probably have the same security questions on that one. Hotmail and yahoo will both tell you your exact birthday under account settings, which helps bypass what security settings facebook has. Gmail is a bit trickier, but only for repeated failed attempts – it’s automated warnings that somebody else is logging in aren’t an issue in this case.

      Really, it comes down to: don’t trust generic security questions, and be careful what you store in the cloud. I’d recommend the ‘reset password by sms’ options gmail and hotmail use these days, it cuts down the list of people who can break into your account easily to a lucky password guess or people who have physical access to your phone.

  • [Prufrock451]

    I imagine this dude cherry-picked his data set, screening out people from responsible demographics.

    …in retrospect, I regret using that term.

• [mtdna]

  Mom??

• [MrJM]

  That’s why I send all of my nude photos by fax.

  – MrJM

• [mark zero]

  I’m surprised he doesn’t also face charges for blackmail. And can we assume this guy lived in his parents’ basement and had no job, to go after 3,200 accounts like that?

• [Anonymous]

  6 years sounds harsh… random ppl see us naked via TSA scanners all the time now.