The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Hacker gets 8 months
Distributed naked photos of celebrities
On Labor Day weekend 2014, they surfaced.
Naked photos and sexual videos depicting more than 100 female celebrities hit the internet. Many of the authentic images, like those of Jennifer Lawrence, Kirsten Dunst and Kate Upton, were grabbed from private iCloud accounts.
Others, portraying people like Ariana Grande and Emma Stone, were decried as fakes by those stars.
Four years later, as Labor Day again
a fourth man charged in the investigation by the FBI was sentenced Wednesday in Federal. District Court in Bridgeport
Judge Victor Bolden sentenced George Garofano, 26, of North Branford, to eight months in prison, followed by three years of supervision by federal probation officers. Bolden ordered Garofano to perform 60 hours of community service during his first year of supervision.
“Two hundred and forty victims were affected (by you),” said Bolden, who was told by Assistant U.S. Attorney Neeraj N. Patel that they included celebrities, college classmates and regular people.
“You misrepresented your identification to get user names and passwords,” the judge said. “Some were complete strangers, others you knew too well.”
He said these “very intimate photos and videos ... are not going away anytime soon.”
Patel told the judge a mother of two and her husband succeeded in getting her stolen naked photos removed from 30 websites, but they quickly pop up on others.
“It’s like the Whack a Mole game,” Patel said.
The investigation conducted by a grand jury in Los Angeles charged Garofano, Ryan Collins, of Penn- sylvania, and Edward Majerczyk and Emilio Herrera, of Illinois, with the hacking. Prison terms of 18 months were imposed on Collins, 16 months on Herrera and nine months on Majerczyk.
The hackers gained entry to the iCloud accounts by using a sophisticated phishing scheme. The prosecution claims they tricked victims into providing user names and passwords by sending emails that appeared to come from Apple security. On other occasions, they lured the victims to a fake Apple iCloud website where they were required to log in.
Garofano, who will turn 27 in a few days, was alapproaches, to surrender Oct. 10 to his designated prison. Richard Lynch, his lawyer, requested the Otisville prison in upstate New York. Its the same facility several convicted defendants in the Bridgeport municipal corruption case were sent in 2003.
In March 18, 2015, FBI agents showed up at Garofano’s home and seized his computer. Lynch said Garofano cooperated from the outset.
On April 11, he pleaded guilty to one count of unauthorized access to a protected computer to gain information. As he sat Wednesday before the judge awaiting sentencing, Garofano heard his mother and father make tearful pleas in his behalf.
“He’s the boy any family would want as their son,” Luigi Garofano said of his son, a Bryant College business graduate. “I believe everybody deserves a second chance. He did one wrong thing in 27 years.”
Patel later said it was 240 wrong things, from April 2013 to October 2014.
Garofano accepted “full responsibility” for his “huge mistake.”
“Not a day goes by that I don’t regret what I’ve done,” he told the judge. “... I wish more than anything I could undo what I’ve done.”