Security News > 2021 > August > California Man Hacked iCloud Accounts to Steal Nude Photos
A California man impersonated an Apple customer support technician in a socially engineered email campaign that stole people's iCloud passwords to break into accounts and collected upwards of 620,000 private photos and videos.
Hao Kuo Chi, 40, of La Puente, has agreed to plead guilty to four felonies, including conspiracy to gain unauthorized access to a computer, in a scam that ultimately aimed to steal and share nude images of young women, according to court records and a report by the Los Angeles Times.
Chi admitted to marketing himself as a hacker-for-hire that could break into iCloud accounts using the moniker "Icloudripper4you." He then would dupe people into giving up their Apple IDs and passwords so he could steal photos from where they were stored in the cloud on Apple servers.
The two accounts included 500,000 emails, 4,700 of which contained iCloud user IDs and passwords that victims willingly sent to Chi, according to the FBI. Once he had the credentials, Chi would break into the iCloud account of a particular account holder at the request of whoever hired him for the job.
The parties used Dropbox to exchange photos, with Chi's Dropbox account including about 620,000 photos and 9,000 videos that were organized based on whether they contained nude images, according to FBI agent Anthony Bossone, the LA Times reported.
Federal authorities became wise to Chi's activity in March 2018 after a California company that specializes in removing celebrity photos from the internet notified an unidentified public figure in Tampa, Fla., that nude photos of the person had been posted on pornographic websites, according to Bossone.