If you click on Jennifer Lawrence's naked pictures, you're perpetuating her abuse

[Chan790]

63. I'm about 90% sure this was done by teenaged hackers.

Primarily because of whose photos were released. It's a cornucopia of masturbatory-fantasy subjects specifically of 15 year old boys. Cherry-picked to that end. The pool of victims of a hacker(s) even 3 years older would be dramatically different and over a broader age range. Different actresses would have been targeted. Several victims would not have been people whose peccadilloes would have been specifically sought-out. (That is, if making a specific hit-list of people whose cloud-storage to hack to look for scandalous photos...a lot of other people make more sense than supporting actresses on Glee, lesser Disney stars, and an 18 year old gymnast.) We know, via certain edited photos of things like file-folders reposted by the media, that this was done by gaining access to accounts.

Two, this was done via an iCloud exploit. If NSA had an iCloud exploit...it would be among their dearest and most-closely held secrets. Virtually nobody outside of compartmentalized clearance would know about it...and because of that, the fact that only about 15 people would know and 9 or more would be non-technical supervisory personnel (Mostly people like POTUS, NSA Director Gen. Alexander, and DNI Clapper...all of whom I think you can safely rule-out)...nobody in that compartment would publicly utilize it in this way, they know they'd be found instantly. If the purpose was to burn the exploit in a pro-privacy action (something more Snowden than Tichý)...they'd have released different material: something damning to the surveillance state.

Three. Based on the proof-of-concept of a brute force exploit via "Find my iPhone" posted to GitHub yesterday, I have a fairly good idea of how this was done. This may be huge and apocalyptic but in terms of how it was done...script-kiddie shit. As long as you know someone has an iPhone and you know their email address or User ID, you just need the utility...it might take 50 minutes or 3 hours for the utility to try a few million combinations but given a long window, access is inevitable.