'Somebody Ended Up Ratting Me Out': Miley's Naughty-Photo Hacker Speaks
In a sneak attack befitting the kind of malcontent who would dare despoil America's slutty sweetheart, FBI agents this week apprehended the man they say hacked into Miley Cyrus's e-mail account and posted scandalously skin-baring, kiss-blowing, shirt-gnawing private photographs. The feds brought a search warrant to the Murfreesboro, Tenn., home of Josh Holly, 19, who watched them cart away three computers and a cell phone — thus forcing the admitted hacker also known as TrainReq to find alternate means of spilling his virtually unabridged story to Wired.com. And are we ever glad he did.After all, we might never experience the geeky, naughty rush of shattering security protocols everywhere from MySpace to Gmail (and then bragging about it later). But when we've got a dumb-ass as spectacularly candid as Holly sharing his road map with us, it's like we can almost smell the SWAT team outside our own door:
Holly told Threat Level he stole about a dozen Cyrus pictures but only published the most provocative ones. He said 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. He found the password Cyrus used for her MySpace account — Loco92 — and tried it on a Gmail account Cyrus was known to use. The password worked on that account as well, but only for a couple of weeks before it was changed. [...] The agents came armed with a dossier of information they'd amassed on his past activities — including online forums he had frequented and spamming activity he'd been involved in more than two years ago, which he said he'd disclosed to only a few people. "I guess somebody ended up ratting me out," he said.
Hiiiiighly doubtful, especially considering his clear tendency toward painstaking discretion both in interviews and online, where fellow hackers said he'd "been acting like an attention starved 8-year-old." Nevertheless, Holly has yet to be arrested or charged with a crime; investigators are expected to review the evidence, however, just as soon as they've successfully tried their case against Miley's better-known exploiters at Vanity Fair.