LOS ANGELES (AP) – As federal investigators worked Tuesday to determine who stole and posted nude photos of several female celebrities online, the images continued to be removed from various sites.
Copyright complaints apparently prompted the removal of the image from sharing site Imgur.com and rendered links on the social networking site Reddit inoperable in what experts call an online version of “whack-a-mole” that will never fully scrub the intimate photos of Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence and other stars from the Internet.
Apple said Tuesday that its engineers have determined that hackers breached individual accounts, but didn’t obtain general access to a pair of its services, iCloud and Find my iPhone. While the tech giant released the results after it said it conducted 40 hours of investigation, law enforcement inquiries likely will take days or weeks to complete.
The FBI offered no details Tuesday on its efforts to identify the people responsible for stealing the images and posting them, but said on Monday that the agency was aware of the breach and was “addressing the matter.” Previous investigations have involved the use of search warrants and digital forensics to determine how hackers obtained everything from Paris Hilton’s contact list to nude photos of actresses Scarlett Johansson and Mila Kunis.
Lawrence, a three-time Oscar nominee who won for her role in “Silver Linings Playbook,” contacted authorities after the images began appearing Sunday. By Tuesday, a Reddit thread that had been compiling links to images of nude photos of Lawrence and other celebrities had been disabled “due to a copyright claim.” Users reported difficulty finding working links to the images on other sites, although they remained active on sites that specialize in online piracy.