Nov 3, 2010 08:22 GMT  ·  By

A California man was arrested on Friday under suspicion of hacking into the email and Facebook accounts of over 170 women and in many cases exposing their explicit intimate pictures online.

George Samuel Bronk, 23, of Citrus Heights, CA, faces thirty felony charges associated with computer intrusion, identity theft, extortion and child pornography.

The California Highway Patrol (CHP) began investigating Bronk two months ago, after his IP address was linked to a compromise reported to the Connecticut State Police.

Officers from CHP's Computer Crimes Investigations Unit served a search warrant on Bronk's home and found evidence of numerous intrusions when they analyzed data on his computer.

It seems that between September 2009 and September 2010, the hacker compiled personal dossiers for over 3,200 women using publicly accessible information from Facebook.

This data helped him guess answers to security questions and allowed him to perform successful password resets on email accounts belonging to at least 170 women.

In many cases he found and extracted explicit intimate pictures from these mailboxes, which he then posted on the Facebook profiles of his victims or emailed them to their friends.

Apparently he enjoyed causing serious embarrassment and distress to women and he even tried to blackmail some of them.

The Sacramento Bee reports of one case when he contacted a victim via chat and asked her to send him more compromising pictures of herself, to avoid spreading the ones he already had. The woman complied.

In addition to nude or semi-nude pictures, equally embarrassing videos belonging to his victims were found on his computer, along with 1,100 child abuse images.

The California Highway Patrol is assisted in the investigation by the Sacramento Valley Hi-Tech Crimes Task Force, the FBI and the California Attorney General's Office.

This case should serve as a reminder for everyone to be very careful of what information they leave in their email accounts, including the Sent folder.