14 DAY TRIAL // It was the belief of many that the administrator of the website showing leaked photos of celebrities was also involved somehow in hacking the famous cloud storage accounts to steal the compromising content.
According to The Sun, the individual has been identified as Sergei Kholodovskii. He is 28 years old and the publication quotes him as saying that he has no problem with providing an online space that centralizes all the personal content of the celebrities.
“I do not see any problem with it,” Kholodovskii was quoted as saying. “If there are more pictures to post, we will post them,” he added.
Website has personal content of more than 100 celebs
The website offering access to illegally obtained pics has multiple mirrors in order to provide continued access to the content in case one server fails to do so.
Apart from the leaked images, it is also home to aggressive advertising, which is how the owner makes money; and according to online sources, a visitor accesses about 11 pages on a daily basis. With more than three million visitors since its inception, it should translate into a very lucrative business.
At the moment, personal content of about 126 famous females (ordered alphabetically) is available on the website.
Traffic is run through Cloudflare’s network of servers, which offers increased page load times and protection against threats and abuses that may waste bandwidth.
Others do the hacking, Kholodovskii just posts the content
It appears that Kholodovskii is in no way involved with the hacking activity behind the leaks and he only puts the loot on display.
“All the pictures were taken from open sources. We are not using any secret or hacked stuff here,” he was quoted as saying.
There is even a message on every page saying that all the photos are freely available on the Internet and that those responsible for the website did not hack iCloud, email, or other accounts.
Furthermore, the message says that a takedown request from the owner of the photo would be honored.
“If somebody is unhappy to the point of taking action to sue us — well, we’ll just shut down the website and that will be it,” Kholodovskii told The Sun.
However, it is unclear how many such requests have been resolved until now, given that many celebrities, if not all, do not agree with others peaking into their personal life.
The Russian sees the website as good PR, especially for some of the females who have been somewhat in the shade until now. His opinion is not shared by actress Jennifer Lawrence, though, who said in a Vanity Fair interview that the entire hacking incident was not a scandal, but a “sex crime.”
“It is a sexual violation. It’s disgusting. The law needs to be changed, and we need to change. That’s why these Web sites are responsible. Just the fact that somebody can be sexually exploited and violated, and the first thought that crosses somebody’s mind is to make a profit from it,” she said for Vanity Fair.