A Man hacked 3,200 Gmail Accounts

1)     Sometimes you read about a criminal who is so much of a small-minded pervert and borderline mutant you almost can’t help but admire him. George Bronk is just such a criminal: the 23-year old has just pleased guilty to hacking into the email accounts of 3,200 girls, looking for nude photographs, then posting the pictures to their public Facebook profiles. That’s some single-minded skeeviness.
2)     Bronk was arrested in late October after he used the same technique that was popularized by hacker David Kernell to break into Sarah Palin’s email. Namely, Bronk scoured his victims’ Facebook accounts looking for the answers to security questions used for password recovery by services like Gmail and Yahoo Mail.
3)      Once he had access to an email account, it was go time: he’d do an extensive search for nude photographs sent by the account holder, then trigger a Facebook password recovery to get into their account and post the pictures live to their profiles.
4)     Gronk did this to over 172 women: he even convinced one woman to send him even more explicit photos of herself by threatening to post the ones he’d already stolen if she didn’t. 
5)     Gronk now faces six years in prison for felony hacking, child pornography (it seems several of the girls were minors) and identity theft charges. 
6)     Wow. Most pervs would stop at just getting the naked photos, but the added step of posting them to the girls’ own Facebook profile? That’s just the creep-de-la-creep.

Posted in: Hacking news