Celebgate is an event created by Internet users. It is connected with a leak of private nude photos of almost 500 mostly female celebrities. It is a reference to the Watergate scandal, a political scandal in the Unites States. The first leaks were posted on August 31, 2014 on the imageboard 4chan. Although the images got deleted after an abuse report, the images spread to other websites such as Imgur and Reddit.
The event is also called "The Fappening". A portmanteau of the word fap and the movie "The Happening".
iCloud nude leaks of celebs
It turned out that a lot of the nude photos were stolen directly out of the celebrities Apple cloud iCloud. The issue was the iCloud API which allowed unlimited attempts of guessing the passwords. Later, other celebrities, like Jennifer Lawrence and Kaley Cuoco, have received phishing e-mails. The leaks, increased the concern about privacy when using cloud computing services.
Court documents from 2014 show, that the photos were shared privately for some month till their public release in August 2014. Rumours say, there are still unreleased photos of Katy Perry and Selena Gomez! Make they will leak one day.
The Celebgate leaks not only contained photos. A lot of short clips of celebs having sex or mastrubating where leaked as well. Kate Upton and Abigail Spencer are the best known celebs, which had sexually explicit videos in their cloud. Those clips are kind of the modern celebrity sextapes leaked some years ago.
Some celebrities tried to sue websites who uploaded their private pictures. Other, such as Kirsten Dunst, just accepted the leak with a smile.
List of well known leaked celebs in 2014:
Jennifer Lawrence - Over a dozen nude photos
Kaley Cuoco - Nude photos and three short clips
Rihanna - Some nude photos (not showing pussy)
Kate Upton - Numerous nude photos and sexually explicit videos
Over the years more content leaked now and then. It is not sure if the new leaks are just not published leaks of the 2014 fappening, or if there are more hackers getting access to private photos and videos. In 2018 major celebs like Emma Watson and the German musician Lena Meyer-Landrut have been leaked. In March 2019 another wave of more or less well known celebrities leaks spread over the world wide web.
The only thing that can be said for sure about the new leaks is, that those leaked celebs are not hacked by the first Celebgate hackers. Ryan Collins, Edward Majerczyk, George Garofano and Christopher Brannan have agreed to pled guilty in March 2016. They have been sentenced to prison for up to 18 month.
According to Reddit there are croud funding projects in the dark web. People raise crypto money for well known celebrities to be hacked, which is ethically doubtful! We will keep you updated if any new leaks become public.
