Maria Puente

USA TODAY

Paparazzi may be a pain but at least you can see them. Not so for the hackers stealing nude pictures of celebrities and spilling them online.

Who's next? Because there will be a next time. Even though hacking/stealing is a federal crime punishable by years in jail.

"(The FBI) will mostly likely catch them, because they're relatively easy to catch and many have already been caught," says Philip Lieberman, CEO of Lieberman Software, which builds cyber defense technology for governments and corporations. "There will be a perp walk, because they want to send a message. And the celebrities will have their indignant outrage and publicity they could never have paid for."

This comes up because for the second time in less than a month, another load of intimate photos turned up on websites that traffic in this sort of thing, targeting women celebs such as Kim Kardashian, Vanessa Hudgens, Rihanna, Jenny McCarthy, Kate Bosworth, Mary-Kate Olsen, Avril Lavigne, Hayden Panettiere, Lake Bell and others.

At least two women, Gabrielle Union and Meagan Good, have confirmed the photos, which appeared over the weekend and were quickly taken down, are authentic, and they are furious. Union's legal team is reported to be in contact with the FBI, which is investigating the earlier leak.

Union described the hackers who stole topless photos she sent to her new husband, basketball star Dwyane Wade, as "vultures." She's the victim of digital "atrocities," she said in a statement over the weekend to TMZ.

"It has come to our attention that our private moments, that were shared and deleted solely between my husband and myself, have been leaked by some vultures," the statement said. "I can't help but to be reminded that since the dawn of time women and children, specifically women of color, have been victimized, and the power over their own bodies taken from them. These atrocities against women and children continue worldwide."

Good posted on her Instagram page Sunday that she's "definitely in shock' and "saddened."

"But I 'choose' not to give the persons responsible my power," she said. "For everyone who's reposting the leaked nudes? You should be ashamed of yourself."

But since it keeps happening, and since many people re-posted them, clearly shame has no role in this business.

The new pictures originally appeared on Reddit and the image-sharing site 4chan but were quickly removed. Reddit has banned the landing page where users shared leaked images of naked celebrities.

This latest spill comes after intimate photos of other celebs, including Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton and Kirsten Dunst, were stolen from their personal Apple accounts and posted online.

Some of them were fake, but as many as 100 stars were targeted in the leak, now under investigation by the FBI and by Apple.



Lieberman says it's likely that the second episode is related to the first one, and probably carried out by the same hackers. The first hack took place over months and so much material was stolen that it could be released in batches.

But if hackers are so easy to catch, why do they do what they do? Because they're "sociopaths" collecting "trophies," Lieberman says.

"There's a pecking order in the criminal hacker community, that the more you steal and the better the photo, the cooler you are," he says. "These (celeb nude photos) are trophies in the community — it shows how powerful they were to get these trophies and share them around. It's a competition."

And there's no better trophy than a topless celeb to this crowd. So why do the stars put their private stuff in the cloud?

"Because it's there," says Robert Thompson, professor of pop culture at Syracuse University. "The cloud is the new photo album. It's become for many people the way they store their photos and they're not thinking that this might not be secure.

"But if they've not learned this lesson yet, they're taking an awful long time to learn it," Thompson says.

It's possible that a few celebs might consider such a photo leak to be good publicity, "another step in their managerial portfolio," Thompson says. But most are genuinely outraged at the privacy invasion.

So what should they — and all the rest of us — do? Take advice from hack-target Kardashian:

"I think it's a wake-up call for people to make sure they have every privacy setting," she said earlier this month. "It seems like there are a lot of people that love to spend their time hacking peoples' information and that's just a scary thing."

Lieberman says the solution is simple but inconvenient: Better passwords. "You have to have a complex password that is hard to guess and then don't share it."

More than a few moms might also add: Don't put nude photographs of yourself in the cloud.

Lena Dunham, for one, compared that advice to the "rapist's apologia" of "don't wear a short skirt." Women should be free to to take nude pictures of themselves and not be subjected to this invasion of privacy, Dunham has been tweeting.

Yes, and people should be free to leave their doors unlocked and not be subjected to burglars stealing their stuff. But it's not that kind of world yet.