ElcomSoft is a privately owned software company headquartered in Moscow, Russia. Since its establishment in 1990, the company has been working on computer security programs, with the main focus on password and system recovery software.
Phishing is a form of social engineering and a scam where attackers deceive people into revealing sensitive information or installing malware such as viruses, worms, adware, or ransomware. Phishing attacks have become increasingly sophisticated and often transparently mirror the site being targeted, allowing the attacker to observe everything while the victim navigates the site, and transverses any additional security boundaries with the victim. As of 2020, it is the most common type of cybercrime, with the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center reporting more incidents of phishing than any other type of cybercrime.
A celebrity sex tape is typically an amateur pornographic video recording involving one or more famous people which has, intentionally or unintentionally, been made available publicly. Such videos have often been released without the consent of their subjects and have damaged celebrities' careers. In 1988, for example, a sex tape caused significant damage to Rob Lowe's career.
Mary Louis "Maria" Kanellis-Bennett is an American professional wrestler, manager, promoter, singer and model. She is signed to All Elite Wrestling and Ring of Honor (ROH). She is best known for her tenures in WWE and TNA.
Kari Ann Peniche Williams is an American actress and entertainer from Fairview, Oregon. She has held the Miss Oregon Teen USA and Miss United States Teen titles. She was stripped of the latter title after appearing nude in the November 2004 issue of Playboy.
There has been demand for imagery of nude celebrities for many decades. It is a lucrative business exploited by websites and magazines.
Sextortion employs non-physical forms of coercion to extort sexual favors from the victim. Sextortion refers to the broad category of sexual exploitation in which abuse of power is the means of coercion, as well as to the category of sexual exploitation in which threatened release of sexual images or information is the means of coercion.
Ashley Madison, or The Ashley Madison Agency, is a Canadian online dating service and social networking service. It was launched in 2002 and marketed to people who are married who are looking for affairs. The website's slogan is "Life is short. Have an affair."
Michael Bennett is an American professional wrestler. He is signed to All Elite Wrestling (AEW) and its sister promotion Ring of Honor (ROH), where he is a member of The Undisputed Kingdom stable. Bennett previously competed for WWE under the ring name Mike Kanellis, and for Impact Wrestling.
iCloud is a cloud service operated by Apple Inc. Launched on October 12, 2011, iCloud enables users to store and sync data across devices, including Apple Mail, Apple Calendar, Apple Photos, Apple Notes, contacts, settings, backups, and files, to collaborate with other users, and track assets through Find My. It is built into iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS, macOS, and visionOS. iCloud may additionally be accessed through a limited web interface and Windows application.
Is Anyone Up? was a pornographic website based on stolen and hacked photos that ceased operation in 2012. It allowed users to submit photographs or videos anonymously, mainly nude, erotic, and sexually explicit images. The site was closely associated with the metalcore and post-hardcore music scene, also featuring and depicting numerous nude photos of musicians of these genres.
Revenge porn is the distribution of sexually explicit images or videos of individuals without their consent, with the punitive intention to create public humiliation or character assassination out of revenge against the victim. The material may have been made by an ex-partner from an intimate relationship with the knowledge and consent of the subject at the time, or it may have been made without their knowledge. The subject may have experienced sexual violence during the recording of the material, in some cases facilitated by psychoactive chemicals such as date rape drugs which also cause a reduced sense of pain and involvement in the sexual act, dissociative effects and amnesia.
On August 31, 2014, a collection of nearly five hundred private pictures of various celebrities, mostly women, with many containing nudity, were posted on the imageboard 4chan, and swiftly disseminated by other users on websites and social networks such as Imgur and Reddit. The leak was dubbed "The Fappening" or "Celebgate" by the public. The images were initially believed to have been obtained via a breach of Apple's cloud services suite iCloud, or a security issue in the iCloud API which allowed them to make unlimited attempts at guessing victims' passwords. Apple claimed in a press release that access was gained via spear phishing attacks.
XVALA is a contemporary artist who is known for using controversial celebrity images and artifacts in his work and for his "Fear Google" campaign addressing loss of privacy in the Internet Age. The artist has cited his concerns about the public nature of personal information in the Internet Age as the driving force behind the campaign but also says that he does not believe in censorship. XVALA describes his work as belonging to the "Post-PC era".
Lizard Squad was a black hat hacking group, mainly known for their claims of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks primarily to disrupt gaming-related services.
In July 2015, an unknown person or group calling itself "The Impact Team" announced they had stolen the user data of Ashley Madison, a commercial website billed as enabling extramarital affairs. The hacker(s) copied personal information about the site's user base and threatened to release users' names and personal identifying information if Ashley Madison would not immediately shut down. As evidence of the seriousness of the threat, the personal information of more than 2,500 users was initially released. The company initially denied that its records were insecure, but it continued to operate.
OurMine is a hacker group that is known for hacking popular accounts and websites, such as Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg's Twitter accounts. The group often causes cybervandalism to advertise their commercial services, which is among the reasons why they are not widely considered to be a "white hat" group.
Deepfakes are images, videos, or audio which are edited or generated using artificial intelligence tools, and which may depict real or non-existent people. They are a type of synthetic media and modern form of a Media prank.
Fake nude photography is the creation of nude photographs designed to appear as genuine nudes of an individual. The motivations for the creation of these modified photographs include curiosity, sexual gratification, the stigmatization or embarrassment of the subject, and commercial gain, such as through the sale of the photographs via pornographic websites. Fakes can be created using image editing software or through machine learning. Fake images created using the latter method are called deepfakes.
Deepfake pornography, or simply fake pornography, is a type of synthetic pornography that is created via altering already-existing photographs or video by applying deepfake technology to the images of the participants. The use of deepfake porn has sparked controversy because it involves the making and sharing of realistic videos featuring non-consenting individuals, typically female celebrities, and is sometimes used for revenge porn. Efforts are being made to combat these ethical concerns through legislation and technology-based solutions.
