Man charged in Hollywood hack probe

A man has been charged with hacking into the emails of dozens of people, including Christina Aguilera, Scarlett Johansson and Mila Kunis, in a computer invasion scheme which targeted Hollywood celebrities, according to documents released today.

Christopher Chaney, of Jacksonville, Florida, hacked Google, Apple and Yahoo email accounts last November and December, then hijacked the forwarding feature so that a copy of every email received was sent, “virtually instantaneously”, to an email account he controlled, according to an indictment handed up by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles yesterday.

There were more than 50 victims, including actress Renee Olstead, according to the indictment.

Chaney allegedly used the hacker names “trainreqsuckswhat”, “anonygrrl” and “jaxjaguars911”. He is charged with 25 counts of identity theft, unauthorised access and unauthorised damage to a protected computer.

The FBI announced that it had made an out-of-state arrest this morning in a year-long investigation of celebrity hacking dubbed Operation Hackerazzi.

Nude shots of Johansson appeared on an internet site earlier this year and TMZ.com reported that hackers stole them from her mobile phone.

Celebrities and people in the news have long been targets of privacy invasion but concerns have redoubled in the internet age.

In Britain, publisher Rupert Murdoch closed down the News of the World this year after claims that the Sunday tabloid routinely hacked into people’s phones in the hunt for exclusive stories.

The paper, which had been published for 168 years, faced allegations of systematically intercepting the private voicemails of those in the news - including teenage murder victim Milly Dowler.