Purported Miley Cyrus Hacker Pleads Guilty to Spamming From Hacked Celebrity ...
A hacker who boasted that he was responsible for stealing and posting provocative pictures stolen from Miley Cyrus’ Gmail account pleaded guilty on Monday to other charges involving credit card fraud and hacking.
Josh Holly, 21, pleaded guilty to possessing about 200 stolen credit card numbers, and to breaching celebrity MySpace pages in a spamming scheme that earned him at least $100,000.
Holly has never been charged with hacking Cyrus’s e-mail account, but after bragging online about this and other activity, and taunting authorities that they would never find him, his apartment in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, was raided in October 2007, at which point authorities found evidence of the cards and spamming scheme.
Holly, who went by the screen names “TrainReq,” “Rockz” and “h4x,” told Threat Level in 2008 that he had gained access to a Gmail account Cyrus had used (messagemebaby@gmail.com) and found images the Hannah Montana actress had purportedly sent to singer Nick Jonas of the Jonas Brothers.
Holly claimed that he tried to sell the pictures to TMZ.com and other celebrity outlets, but no one would buy them, given the illegal manner by which he’d obtained them. He then posted some of them online at digitalgangster.com, after which numerous gossip and celebrity websites published them for free. More photos followed thereafter.
The images showed the then-15-year-old Cyrus in a wet T-shirt in the shower, baring her midriff while blowing a kiss to a mirror, and posing seductively in her underwear and bathing suit.
Holly told Threat Level he got access to Cyrus’s Gmail account after obtaining unauthorized access to a MySpace administrative panel where he found passwords for MySpace accounts stored in cleartext. Holly said he obtained access to the administrative panel by social engineering a MySpace employee. Once inside the panel, he found the password Cyrus used for her MySpace account — Loco92 — and tried it on a Gmail account she was known to use.
In addition to stealing Cyrus’s password, he reset MySpace account passwords for a number of other celebrity MySpace users, then used their accounts for a spamming scheme that he said netted him about $50,000.
According to an affidavit (.pdf), Holly admitted to the FBI that beginning in 2005 he had hijacked numerous celebrity internet accounts to conduct spamming. An investigation of his bank records showed that between November 2007 and July 2008, he received more than $110,000 from companies for spamming on their behalf. Holly told Threat Level that half of his illicit income went to an accomplice in Israel who used the online nickname elul21 (Elul is the Hebrew name of a month on the Jewish calendar).
My Space Bulletins - News
Once he had passwords to the accounts, he used the accounts to send bulletins to all of the friends on the MySpace accounts advertising a ringtone or call service for the recording artist. For example, he'd send out a bulletin from Fall Out Boy's
by Nobodaddy on 08-16-2011 It's come to our attention recently that the Myspace bulletins aren't reaching as many of you as they used to. At first we thought that maybe we had just disabled the comments accidentally,
Celebrities have catfights and mental breakdowns on Twitter, and professionals discuss their work-related issues on Facebook, MySpace, or other social media sites. Among all the drama and whining are a few very skilled dental professionals using
Lots of people know Facebook, but have forgotten or never heard of MySpace. Most folks don't remember, AOL chat, IRC chat, or the bulletin board days. We have certainly progressed to the point where most people don't even use email to communicate or
I am also grateful to the for giving me this space every week to write about my advocacies, which are close to my heart because these concern the things I do and want to do for the benefit of our country and people, including the future
Articles 20VN | Make Money on MySpace | myspace | money | home ...
Meet people in your area in the country and stay in touch. The site includes blog, forums, email, groups, games and events. Network with over 74 million friends.
Have you noticed that the number? 74 Million! 74000000 consumers, it was reported that MySpace is the second most visited site on the entire Internet, even more than Google. When I signed a few weeks ago it was 68 million, when you get around to reading this I am sure that the approach one billion dollars. That's why you can not ignore MySpace as a marketing avenue!
Recently I started experimenting on using MySpace to promote businesses.The reaction was very good so far. There is a huge
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A few weeks ago I signed up on MySpace. I had no real interest, thought it was just for kids, but with it being non-stop on the news lately, I guess I'd better check it out.
Marketing on MySpace involves a wide range of methods, including:
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Well, the sky advertisers. So I created a profile and looked around a bit. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that they had excellent forums. Business & Entrepreneurs were the ones that caught my attention. After completing a couple of bases in the profile, I created a blog on the quick and dirty guide Step 5. Finally I posted a couple of messages in the forums, "Hi I'm new, Check out my profile" type stuff, then logged off and didn't give it much thought.
I'd just started a Google Adwords campaign so I thought I'd experiment. I added MySpace keywords to my existing list. After saving the list I clicked refresh after about 15 minutes... Entrepreneur - 4 hits, Affiliate -2, Home Business - 5, MySpace - 285!! In a fifteen minute time frame! Oh people are definitely searching for MySpace information. I removed the keywords as my site had nothing to do with MySpace. Next day I log back into MySpace, and see that I have had a half dozen profile views, and 1 person wants to be my "friend". I post a couple of more messages in the forums, then don't check back for a few days.
Now in that short period of time a couple of things happened. My profile got a modest 18 hits, but my blog had been viewed over 40 times! I quickly checked the stats on my web server, traffic in the last 72 hours had increased over 200%. I was floored. Not only were visitors seeing me on MySpace, but the blog was being distributed outside of the site. So of course I jumped back on MySpace, went looking for new friends, and made a bunch more forum posts & replies. Traffic and hits kept piling up and I knew I was onto something good.
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