So by now you’ve heard of The Fappening–aka the largest leak of stolen celebrity nude photos in the history of the internet. It may or may not still be happening.
Immediately after the leaked photos started hitting the web, internet “experts” began theorizing that the photos came from a breach of Apple’s iCloud service. Apple’s lawyers have yet to say anything. But now there’s a startling new development in the whole thing–there may have been an underground celebrity nude photo trading ring that’s existed on the dark web for years.
Just check out this post on 4Chan:
- yfw there wasn’t just one hack
- yfw there isn’t just one leaker
- yfw there’s been a small, underground celeb n00d-trading ring that’s existed for years
- why wasn’t it revealed earlier? the only way to join the ring is by ‘buying in’ with original pics (‘wins’ as they call them) you’ve acquired by yourself
- (also these guys are greedy f*ckers: if you were the only person in the world in possession of jlaw nudes, would you really give them out? for free??)
- these guys conduct individual attack on celebs through (i presume) a mix of social engineering and (esp for more high-profile targets) straight-up hacking they trade with each other to expand collections
- circle hardly ever widens to include more people– very few people even find out about this ring, and fewer still ahve n00ds to buy in with (bitcoin purchases probably rare)
- … except for self-styled ‘rich kid’ in original /b/ thread
- it appears he bought a few sample pix and blew the lid on this whole operation by sharing them with outsiders for the first time
- spotting their chance, and realising the n00d collections was revealed, a couple of other guys from this circle came out of the wordwork offering up some of their collections of donations
explains why:
- we didn’t get one massive filedump: no single person has access to all the pics
- we got MEW nudes even though she deleted them years ago
- there were multiple “official” bitcoin addresses each linked to actual, new leaks
- most leaks are shitty, a couple of images at a time, presumably from small-timers with small collections and relatively littel to lose by devaluing their pics anyway
- we arent’ getting the really good movies, because they are much more ‘valuable” and therefore a) owned by fewer people and b) could be traded for many more nudes and would lose all value if released for free
- check old threads on anon-b /stol/ and /c/ for insight into these guys
- & brace for multiple arrests as the net tightens around the trading ring
So what have we learned? That there’s a good chance this has been going on for years–and that if it wasn’t for some rich kid trying to act cool, this would have continued.