George Bronk, a 23-year-old guy, scoured Facebook profiles to hack e-mail accounts of dozens of women. He would then send any nude pictures he found to the women’s entire address book because he thought “it was funny”.
The stuff Bronk did was pretty nasty. He would target female Facebook users who happened to have public e-mail addresses and glean any and all types of info from their profile and conversations (from favourite colours to food to father’s middle name, etc) in order to answer security questions that protected the e-mail account. Armed with the public but personal info, he was able to hack in.
Once hacked, Bronk would comb through each women’s “sent” folder, looking for nude pictures or videos. He’d then send off those pictures to the women’s entire contact list for fun. On more sickening occassions, he’d threaten some of the women directly, saying he’d make the pictures public unless he received more nude pictures from them. The victims likened it to “virtual rape”.
When Bronk was arrested the police found 170 explicit pictures stolen from dozens of women.
If it wasn’t already apparent, now’s a good time for everyone to change their passwords and security questions to something ridiculously difficult and impossible to decipher from public information. Or stop taking nude pictures. [MSNBC]