August 2014 celebrity photo leaks

On August 31, 2014, a collection of almost 500 private pictures of various celebrities, mostly women, and with many containing nudity, were posted on the imageboard 4chan, and later disseminated by other users on websites and social networks such as Imgur and Reddit. The images were believed to have been obtained via a breach of Apple's cloud services suite iCloud, but it later turned out that the hackers could have taken advantage of a security issue in the iCloud API which allowed them to make unlimited attempts at guessing victims' passwords.

The event, which media outlets and Internet users referred to under names such as "The Fappening" (a portmanteau of the words "fap"—a slang term for masturbation—and the word "happening") and "Celebgate", was met with a varied reaction from the media and fellow celebrities. Critics felt that the distribution of the images was a major invasion of privacy for their subjects, while some of the allegedly depicted subjects questioned their authenticity. The leak also prompted increased concern from analysts surrounding the privacy and security of cloud computing services such as iCloud—with a particular emphasis on their use to store sensitive, private information.

The images were obtained via the online storage offered by Apple's iCloud platform for automatically backing up photos from iOS devices, such as iPhones. Apple later reported that the victims' iCloud account information was obtained using "a very targeted attack on user names, passwords and security questions", such as phishing and brute-force guessing. It was initially believed that the images were obtained using an exploit in the Find My iPhone service. Court documents from 2014 indicated that one user created a fake email account called "appleprivacysecurity" to ask celebrities for security information. The photos were being passed around privately for at least a couple of weeks before their public release on August 31. There are claims that unreleased photos and videos exist. The Daily Mail cited anonymous posters from 4chan and Deadspin who stated that a ring of hackers, traders, and sellers had been operating for months leading up to the mass release.

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