Which Celebrity Nudes Are Leaking Next?

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Sam Biddle

09/22/14 05:40PM

Filed to: celeb leak

Since the nude-leak frenzy of 2014 kicked off with a huge cache of private celebrity smartphone snaps over Labor Day Weekend, the internet has been awash in stolen pictures of famous women—all of whom have appeared on an eerie "master list" being passed around the web's grossest corners.

The list, reproduced below through combined screenshots, first appeared on 4chan at the tail end of August:

Since then, almost all of the higher-profile stars cited have seen their naked selfies and intimate images leak, most recently this past weekend, again via 4chan. One enterprising masturbation enthusiast on Reddit cross-referenced that list with what's surfaced so far and produced the following update (ignore the names on the right):

The list is obviously and immediately suspect just by virtue of its provenance—random 4chan posts. But that it's both specific (that is, it's not just a list of the world's most famous women) and so-far accurate gives us reason to take it with some degree of seriousness. It's virtually impossible to corroborate any "master list"—but with the exception of "Modern Family" actress Sarah Hyland, every woman so far affected by the leaking ring appears up there, including some celebrities, like Mary-Kate Olsen, whose private but non-nude photos and videos have been leaked. (There's a video out there of Olsen feeding her dog spaghetti with her mouth, if you like leaked celebrity content but don't want to see anyone naked.)

Here are the celebrities listed who haven't yet appeared among the leaks:

That's certainly a strange list—heavy on former Nickelodeon and Disney stars and other sci-fi and cult-movie actresses—and I think it's safe to say that many of these people are "not really famous." Some are obscure characters with only some name recognition in the UK, which makes me think at least one of the people responsible for the smartphone security breaches is located there.

We've speculated in the past that the leaks come not from a single hacker or coordinated operation, but a loosely affiliated ring of hackers and phishers who amass collections of leaked celebrity photos by trading the results of one-off operations around the small community—one whose existence was kept perfectly secret until some of its members started talking too much.

The latest batch of images would seem to corroborate this theory. The images were taken several years apart and sourced separately: Kim Kardashian's nudes from this past weekend were taken on her BlackBerry in 2010, suggesting a non-iCloud strike, or that some non-Kanye recipient was targeted.

If the list is accurate, it's likely been painstakingly constructed by one member of the nude-trading community—either from his own collection, or from his knowledge of what his co-conspirators were holding.

Regardless of where it's coming from, Redditors who've been hearing rumors about the entire collection are pumped up to keep jerking off to semi-famous strangers.

Demand aside, none of this is a guarantee of a future dump—whoever keeps releasing from this cache could go silent or wind up behind bars before anyone else gets crossed off (an FBI spokesperson told me no charges have been filed in the investigation so far). Perhaps they're already staying far, far away from 4chan and Reddit, regretting that they left so much premeditation on the internet before vanishing from it.

To contact the author of this post, write to biddle@gawker.com

Photo: Getty