A Chicago man was sentenced to nine months in prison Tuesday for stealing intimate photographs and videos through a sophisticated hacking scheme that targeted hundreds of victims, including dozens of celebrities.
Edward J. Majerczyk, 29, learned his fate more than two years after he began conducting a spear-phishing operation that allowed him to compromise the internet accounts of more than 300 victims to pilfer their private files for his own personal pleasure, according to a plea agreement signed last September.
Majerczyk, who initially faced up to five years in federal prison, will begin serving his sentence on Feb. 27, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois told Reuters.
Thomas Needham, Majerczyk’s lawyer, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Majerczyk managed to gain accessed to his victims’ email and online storage accounts by sending bogus security warnings purported to have come from legitimate Internet Service Providers (ISPs), the plea agreement said.
Masquerading at times as a member of Apple’s privacy team, Majerczyk would send messages to his targets requesting their username and password information, he acknowledged.
“Because of the victims’ belief that the email had come from their ISP, victims would click on a link within the phishing email and, after being redirected to a different website, the victims would then enter their usernames and passwords,” the plea agreement stated.
Majerczyk was then able to recover those credentials and use them on his own to rummage through the internet accounts of victims.
Though prosecutors have refrained from identifying any of Majerczyk’s victims by name, their investigation began after actresses including Jennifer Lawrence and Kirsten Dunst publicly complained about having their nude images leaked online by hackers.
Authorities eventually traced several of those intrusions back to Majerczyk and a Pennsylvania man, Ryan Collins, who similarly pleaded guilty last year and was subsequently sentenced to 18 months in prison. Investigators believe the hackers worked independently of each other, however, and have failed to find any evidence linking either of them to actually leaking their victims’ images online.
Nonetheless, the terms of Majerczyk’s sentence will require him to pay $5,700 toward counseling services for an unidentified celebrity affected in the breach.
In all, prosecutors say more than 30 celebrities were victimized by the hacker’s escapades.
“Majerczyk has consistently expressed remorse for those who were affected by this offense,” Mr. Needham wrote in a pre-sentencing report filed with the court earlier this month.
“At the time of the offense, Mr. Majerczyk was suffering from depression and looked to pornography websites and Internet chat rooms in an attempt to fill some of the voids and disappointment he was feeling in his life,” Mr. Needham wrote.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.