Hackers who earned a burglary of private Photobucket service accounts were arrested

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 crack Photobucket photohosting accounts. Businessmen face up to 10 years in prison and a quarter of a million dollars fines. This is the official accusatory document from the site justice.gov.

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

Hackers released the first version of the program three years ago. Photofucket can pick up passwords for closed albums and photos using the “brute force” method or use the passwords excavated by hackers, which they sent to paid subscribers. After gaining access, the program automatically downloads all the hidden content. By the way, the program itself can still be found online.

During the heyday of MySpace, Photobucket hosting was very popular, which has now greatly decreased due to new wave services like Instagram or Imgur. Then, like MySpace, hosting was purchased by Fox Interactive Media in 2007. Having failed to adequately develop the project, Fox resold it in 2010 to Ontela, a startup that was renamed Photobucket Inc and continues to work on the project to this day. The project itself is still quite popular, perhaps due to a developed system of sorting and content management.
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The tendency of people to look at others is comparable in strength only with the desire to independently upload photo reports about their activities on the Internet. But if you put something on the Internet, even protecting it with a password, or take photos with a device connected to the network, sooner or later it will become publicly available. Especially if you are a popular person. This was proved by the recent scandal with the massive leakage of personal intimate photos and videos from hacked movie star accounts that used Apple devices and their service for backup and photo storage.