Hacker put private photos on porn sites
A trusted bar manager hacked 272 iCloud accounts and posted his victims’ private pictures on amateur porn sites.
Craig Steinberg, inset, used computer software and clever guesswork to gain access to photographs of Apple customers’ most intimate moments.
A trusted bar manager hacked 272 iCloud accounts and posted his victims’ private pictures on amateur porn sites.
Craig Steinberg used computer software and clever guesswork to gain access to photographs of Apple customers’ most intimate moments.
The 31-year-old posted the stolen images on his own websites where he charged a fee for “members” to view content and made 3,000 dollars profit.
Steinberg, who wanted to be the “big man” on public forums, was arrested when a victim in Essex found out her private collection of sexual photographs had been published online and alerted the police.
Newcastle Crown Court heard the hacker was traced through his IP address which linked him to his home in Lily Street, near Hylton Road, Sunderland, where detectives seized three phones, nine harddrives and three memory sticks containing damning evidence of his crimes.
Steinberg pleaded guilty to 14 offences under the Computer Misuse Act between over a 16-month period and has been jailed for a total of 34 months.
Miss Recorder Jo Kidd told him: “You did not keep this to yourself, you uploaded sexual images of those people onto forums and shared it with other people with an interest in looking at private photographs of women.
“This was a persistent and planned attempt by you to gravely undermine a number of individuals’ individual privacy. Your motivation was sexual and entrenched. You benefited financially and also attempted to appear the ‘big man’ to gain friends and influence on forums you were using.”
Prosecutor Mark Giuliani told the court Steinberg, who ran a busy bar in Newcastle city centre, had used software which enabled him to hack the accounts.
Many of the victims were women.
He added: “He used Facebook to get information which allowed him to guess passwords to access the cloud.”
Mr Guiliani said the police investigation was launched after a woman in Essex contacted Action Fraud about her account.
“Your motivation was sexual and entrenched” RECORDER