14 DAY TRIAL // Alonzo Knowles, 23, from the Bahamas, was arrested by New York police after trying to peddle 15 movie scripts to an undercover DHS (Department of Homeland Security) agent, on Monday this week.
Mr. Knowles, known online under the moniker of Jeff Moxey, was accused and charged with hacking the computers and email accounts of 130 celebrities involved in the media, entertainment, and professional sports industries.
The hacker did not directly hack the celebrities, but targeted their friends on social media, with simple social engineering or spear phishing tricks. Once he infected those computers with malware or had tricked their owners into revealing their passwords, he would search their PC or inbox for details about their celebrity friend.
Mr. Knowles used "hacking by proxy" techniques
Using this data, he would later try the same tactics on the celebrity, but with emails coming from their friend's email address.
This simple trick allowed the hacker to gain access to various celebrity social media accounts, inboxes, and computers, where he later found movie or TV show scripts, nude pictures, sexually explicit personal videos, unreleased movie materials, and personal identification information (PII).
Mr. Knowles got caught, after trying to sell some of this data to a New York radio host. This included scripts for the first six episodes of an upcoming season of a very popular television series.
Greed got Mr. Knowles arrested
The radio host contacted the TV series' producer, who then contacted the Department of Homeland Security, who continued negotiations with the hacker, eventually arranging a meeting where he would give them 15 scripts and the social security numbers for four unnamed celebrities (an actress and three athletes), in exchange for $80,000 / €73,200.
Many online magazines and media outlets were quick to label Mr. Knowles as the man behind the infamous Fappening scandal in which multiple celebrities had sexually explicit images leak online via 4chan or Reddit. This is not the case, because the Fappening leak happened through security holes in cloud-storage services, and not by direct or indirect hacking of the victims, as in this case.
This is not the first high-profile celebrity hacker to be arrested. In 2012, Christopher Chaney was sentenced to ten years in prison for hacking celebrities like Scarlett Johansson, Mila Kunis, Christina Aguilera, and Renee Olstead. In 2014, Marcel Lehel Lazar, also known as Guccifer, was arrested for similar activities, against Romanian and US high-profile figures.