Scarlett Johansson Hacker Christopher Chaney Used ‘Publicly Available Data' To Target Celebrities, Says FBI

The FBI held a press conference Wednesday announcing the arrest of Christopher Chaney, a 35-year-old Jacksonville, Fla., man arrested on hacking and wiretapping charges in connection with the Scarlett Johansson nude photo scandal in September.

The arrest was the result of an investigation dubbed Operation Hackerazzi.

The press conference doubled as something of a public safety seminar, with FBI officials warning celebrities and mortals alike how easy it is for hackers to get access to private, personal information and turn it around for profit or gain.

One FBI official called technology hacking a disturbing and rising trend, adding that celebrity information is highly marketable.

The FBI also posted a visual aid titled The Anatomy of a Hack, which explained the steps a hacker takes to infiltrate personal accounts. Among these steps are using open source information to reset passwords, breaching an account and changing the password, communicating with contacts in the account holder's address book, and using the contact list to harvest new targets.

Cheney allegedly mined through publicly available data to figure out passwords and security information on his targets.

An FBI spokesperson insisted that Chaney's was a singular arrest, but added that the FBI is following other leads.

According to The Associated Press, Chaney began hacking into Google, Apple and Yahoo email accounts November and December, then used the forwarding feature to ensure that every email received was sent, virtually instantaneously, to an email account he controlled, according to an indictment handed by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles.

Chaney allegedly used the hacker names trainreqsuckswhat, ''anonygrrl and jaxjaguars911.

In September, nude self-portraits of Johansson began making the rounds on Twitter and other Web sites. Shortly afterwards, an unidentified person sent an email to Perez Hilton, offering to sell compromising photos of Justin Timberlake that he sent to his Friends with Benefits costar.

Johansson was outraged by the invasion of privacy, and enlisted the FBI to investigate.

The Los Angeles Times previously reported that the FBI probe had begun before Johansson's nude photos were leaked.