Inquiries begin into nude celebrity photo leaks
The FBI said Monday it was addressing allegations that online accounts of several celebrities, including Jennifer Lawrence, had been hacked, leading to the posting of their nude photographs online.
Apple said it was looking into whether its online photo-sharing service had been hacked to obtain the intimate images.
Lawrence, a three-time Oscar nominee who won for her role in “Silver Linings Playbook,” contacted authorities after the images began appearing Sunday.
Naked images purporting to be of other female stars were also posted, although the authenticity of many couldn’t be confirmed. The source of the leak was unclear.
Actress Mary Elizabeth Winstead also confirmed that nude photos of her were posted online.“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,” Winstead posted on Twitter.
Winstead, who starred in “Final Destination 3” and “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,” wrote that she thought the images had been destroyed. “Knowing those photos were deleted long ago, I can only imagine the creepy effort that went into this,” she wrote.
Some cybersecurity experts speculated that hackers may have obtained a cache of private celebrity images by exploiting weaknesses in an online image-storing platform.
“It is important for celebrities and the general public to remember that images and data no longer just reside on the device that captured it,” security researcher Ken Westin wrote in a blog post. “Once images and other data are uploaded to the cloud, it becomes much more difficult to control who has access to it, even if we think it is private.” (AP)