Arrested hackers who made money by hacking private accounts of Photobucket service

    Two computer "geniuses", Brandon Buret (39 years old) and Atanasios Andrianakis (26 years old), residents of Colorado and California, respectively, were arrested on charges of distributing the Photofucket program, designed to hack Photobucket photo hosting accounts . Entrepreneurs face up to 10 years in prison and fines of a quarter of a million dollars. This is the official indictment from justice.gov.

    Photobucket users store their photos and videos on the service and create sets from them called “albums”. Access to albums and individual photos can be public - then they appear in collections on the site and can be found by crawlers of search engines. The user can also restrict access to albums and photos, provide guest passwords for access to them, or completely hide them from prying eyes.

    Crackers released the first version of the program three years ago. Photofucket can use brute force passwords for closed albums and photos or use passwords unearthed by hackers that they sent out to paid subscribers. After gaining access, the program automatically downloaded all hidden content. By the way, the program itself can still be found on the network.

    In the heyday of MySpace, Photobucket hosting was very popular, which has now dropped dramatically thanks to new-wave services like Instagram or Imgur. Then, like MySpace, hosting was bought by Fox Interactive Media in 2007. Unable to adequately develop the project, Fox resold it in 2010 to the Ontela startup, which was renamed to Photobucket Inc and continues to work on the project to this day. The project itself is still quite popular, perhaps due to the developed system of sorting and content management.

    The tendency of people to spy on others is comparable in strength only with the desire to independently post photo reports about their activities on the Internet. But if you post something on the Internet, even protecting it with a password, or take photos using a device connected to the network, sooner or later it will become public domain. Especially if you are a popular person. This was proved by the recent scandal with a massive leak of personal intimate photos and videos from hacked movie star accounts that used Apple devices and their service for backup and photo storage.

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