The suspected hacker of one of the biggest celebrity nude photo leaks ever may reside in Chicago, FBI officials said.
The FBI has traced the location of the house, a brick bungalow in the Brighton Park neighborhood, to the South Side of Chicago, where four members of the same family might live.
The "Celebgate" scandal involved many celebrities who uploaded their private pictures to iCloud, but hackers were able to access their accounts and make the images public by using a "brute force" technique to discover passwords, CBS News reported. Using this method, a hacker is able to try an infinite amount of passwords by setting his equipment up in a particular way, eventually gaining access to another user's account.
Nearly 600 online storage accounts could have been breached, according to court documents regarding the 2014 event.
Upon the initial Labor Day weekend leak of private photos belonging to Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Kirsten Dunst, Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting and more female stars, the FBI's Cybercrimes Unit launched an investigation and has been trying to find answers ever since.
After locating the Chicago home, FBI officials seized all of the computers inside but haven't made any arrests yet. The affidavit says only that "someone in that house" is believed to be involved, but the house was vacant on Tuesday. A 30-year-old man named Emilio Herrera could be responsible, but he was not named as a suspect.
"IP and email addresses can be masked or spoofed through a variety of technologies, and Internet data can be routed through third-party computers without their owners' knowledge using any of a number of software packages," NBC News reported.
"All they can probably can trace it to is the particular computer, not who exactly was the person who was the person that was using it," said Governors State professor William Kresse.
"Don't store dirty pictures on the cloud," he added. "You're just setting yourself up for a problem."
Apple is still standing by its initial statement in which it says the hacking was the result of a targeted attack on usernames, passwords and security questions - not a fault in iCloud's security settings, according to E! Online.
The investigation remains ongoing.
