14 DAY TRIAL // While the Fappening scandal has mostly involved celebrities whose iCloud accounts were hacked, a similar incident took place in the Netherlands and targeted the women handball team.
According to local reports, hackers managed to breach the surveillance camera system in a dressing room of a sauna and then posted the recordings on adult websites last December.
While it’s kind of odd that a camera system is being used in a dressing room (and this is one of the reasons they were banned in the country), sauna owner Erik van Ingen Schenau says the company suffered a breach in 2015 when hackers managed to infiltrate the network and steal private footage.
Seven handball players appearing naked in the video
The hackers contacted sauna workers and threatened to post the stolen videos online if the cameras weren’t shut down.
"I received a mail containing a photo, a still from a video of one of the security cameras. With the warning that the images would go online in 14 days if I did not immediately remove the cameras,” Schenau was quoted as saying.
Despite the cameras being taken offline, the hackers decided to publish the videos last December on adult websites. A total of seven women are said to appear in the images, some of them completely naked. It’s not known at this point if there were any requests sent by local officials to these websites to remove the content.
While the existence of a video camera in a dressing room and a hacker breaching this system is worrying to say the least, there are no specifics on how exactly the attackers managed to infiltrate the network and steal the footage. Local officials are now offering guarantees that no other breach would happen since all cameras have been removed, according to the local law.