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Man who hacked celebrities’ data, leaked nudes sentenced to 8 months in prison

He’s the last ‘celebgate’ hacker to be sentenced.

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Kris Seavers

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A hacker who conspired to leak Jennifer Lawrence and other celebrities’ nude photos has been sentenced to eight months in prison and three years of supervision after release, Engadget reports.

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George Garofano, 26, pleaded guilty to infiltrating iCloud accounts belonging to hundreds of people, including celebrities, by conning them into providing their usernames and passwords. His efforts were part of the 2014 “celebgate” attack that exposed nude photos allegedly of Lawrence, Ariana Grande, actress Krysten Ritter, and others on 4chan.

Engadget reports that the prosecution in the case wrote a memo saying Garofano acquired logins and stole data—including nude photos—240 times over an 18-month span.

Garofano is the last of the four “celebgate” hackers to receive a sentence and faces the shortest time. Ryan Collins was sentenced to 18 months in prison, and the two others were given at least nine months, according to Engadget.

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After the hack and its accompanying media fallout, Lawrence told Vanity Fair she believed the act of leaking her nude photos to be a “sex crime.”

“It is a sexual violation,” Lawrence said at the time. “It’s disgusting. The law needs to be changed, and we need to change.”

H/T Engadget

 
The Daily Dot