Feds recommend jail, fines for Scarlett Johansson hacker

Prosecutors want the man who broke into the email accounts of Scarlett Johansson, Mila Kunis and other celebrities to receive a hefty prison fine and pay tens of thousands of dollars to his victims.

In a filing, U.S. attorney requested that Christopher Chaney, 35, of Jacksonville, Fla., serve 71 months in prison and pay a $150,000 fine. He would also pay Johansson $66,179.46 in compensation after hijacking nude images of the actress from her personal email account. 

Chaney is scheduled to be sentenced next month.

Following an 11-month police investigation dubbed “Operation Hackerazzi,” Chaney initially pleaded innocent in November after being charged in a 26-count indictment with accessing and damaging protected computers without authorization, wiretapping and aggravated identity theft.

Originally facing up to 121 years in prison, his attorneys struck a deal in March that halved the prison time if he pleaded guilty to nine counts.

Chaney reset his victims' email accounts, who also included singer Christina Aguilera and television sitcom actress Renee Olstead, by using publicly available information to answer security questions.

Once he compromised the accounts, he changed the settings so that all of their emails would be automatically forwarded to him. In addition to photos, Chaney looted emails and other personal documents from his Hollywood victims.

After Chaney gained access to the personal information, he passed along nude photos to a fellow hacker, as well as two celebrity websites, which made them public.

More in News

Privacy-bolstering "Apps Act" introduced in House

The bill would provide consumers nationwide with similar protections already enforced by a California law.

Microsoft readies permanent fix for Internet Explorer bug used in energy attacks

Microsoft is prepping a whopper of a security update that will close 33 vulnerabilities, likely including an Internet Explorer (IE) flaw that has been used in targeted website attacks against the U.S. government.

Weakness in Adobe ColdFusion allowed court hackers access to 160K SSNs

Up to 160,000 Social Security numbers and one million driver's license numbers may have been accessed by intruders.