Security News > 2021 > August > Social account thief goes to prison for stealing, trading nude photos
A New York man received a three-year sentence in federal prison for hacking social media accounts of dozens of female college students and stealing nude photos and videos of them.
Nicholas Faber, 25, of Rochester, along with co-conspirator Michael Fish, accessed the school email accounts of female students at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh to get the information that allowed them to hack into their social media and cloud storage accounts.
For two years, between 2017 and 2019, they illegally accessed dozens of email accounts with the scope of stealing nude, sexually explicit, and personally embarrassing images and video material.
The defendant solicited and received such stolen nude materials of specific women, some of whom he knew personally," reads the plea agreement.
According to the prosecutors, Faber tried to hack into more than two dozen accounts of females he knew but managed to break into just ten of them.
When complaints came in about account lockouts due to the unauthorized password changes, the university started to investigate and acted to prevent the "Hackers" from accessing the systems through virtual private networks.