RedHanded - Shorthand: The 2014 Celebrity ‘iCloud Leaks’

Episode Date: April 17, 2026

Intimate and explicit images of A-list celebrities – that’s what the world woke up to on the 31st of August 2014. “The Fappening” saw thousands of leaked celebrity nudes dumped onto 4chan, Reddit, and Twitter. It gave unprecedented access to the most overtly private images anyone could imagine – but how on earth did it happen? This week on ShortHand we’re taking a deep dive into the grubby world of AnonIB and leaked-nude “collectors”: users who hoard and circulate explicit images without the subject’s consent – celebrity or not. So how do these images come to be online? And how do we stop it from happening? --Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / Instagram

On the 31st of August 2014, two photographs appeared on the front page of Reddit. One was of Kate Upton, and the other one was of Jennifer Lawrence. And both of these pictures showed these women naked. I forgot about Kate Upton. I remember Jennifer Lawrence. Yeah. Both were originally posted to the celebrity's respective subreddits, which have fan pages dedicated to sharing gossip and quote-unquote hot pictures of two of Hollywood's most popular stars.

And Reddit is a scary place. I would recommend staying away at all costs. I certainly do. But these particular subreddits are rife with suggestive photoshoots, screenshots from topless movie scenes, and even Photoshopped fake nude images. What made these new photos unusual

was that they were not from a film. And they weren't photoshopped either. These photos were amateur pictures, clearly taken on someone's phone, and they were of these two women in explicit positions, not together, separate. These photos were leaked nudes, private, private, private. Oh, God. So obviously over the next few hours, more explicit photos of more celebrities started raining down on Reddit's front page.

Until, by the end of the day, literally every A-list female celebrity you could think of was featured naked for everyone to see. Can you imagine the B-list stars making frantic calls to their agents about why their nudes haven't been leaked? You'd be raging, wouldn't you? That's a really good point. And who were these A-list stars? It was everybody from Scarlett Johansson to Rihanna and Brie Larson and even members of the US Women's National Football, as in soccer, team. It was absolute chaos.

But how did this happen? How did over a hundred celebrities have their most intimate pictures leaked? How did they spread so quickly? And how did they disappear from the internet? To be more crude, how did a picture of one of the most famous actors in the world, naked with ejaculate on her face, make it onto Twitter's most trending? Well, the answers to all of those questions are in fact far grosser than you probably originally thought. They take us all the way to the real forgotten corners of the internet.

Areas dedicated entirely to finding and exposing people's most private moments. But finally, and most importantly in this episode, we're also going to talk about what you can do to protect yourself and your private images from being spread for all to see. This is the shorthand. Unsurprisingly, this whole debacle didn't start on mainstream sites like Twitter. It didn't even start on the, hellhole that's read it. If you do a preliminary Google of this incident, a lot of outlets will say

that, as a usual, it all started on 4chan. But even that isn't really true. Fawtan might be seen as the deep, dark, scary hole of the internet, which it is, but in truth, it's quite mainstream, which you would never say to anyone who is on 4chan. Hundreds of thousands of people visit Voschan every single day and in order to pull off something this shocking and this invasive, users need somewhere a lot more private. And this whole shit show actually developed on an image board that is much less frequented called a non-I-B. For all intents and purposes, a non-I-B is basically a one-to-one copy of Fawchan.

They look the same, they're both split into small sub-communities called boards, and most importantly, they're both completely. anonymous, as anonymous as you can get on the internet. Uh-huh. But while 4chan is dedicated to hosting all kinds of different anonymous conversations, from art to politics to doxing YouTubers, a non-I-B is dedicated to one thing and one thing only. Porn.

The community on anon-I-B refer to themselves as collectors, and they spend every waking hour sourcing and cataloging porn. God's sake, so fucking lame, you fucking nerd. Just like get a life, start knitting or something, you know. Anything, anything. But they don't care what we have to say. 50% of what they're sourcing and cataloging is like normalish mainstream porn. Half of it is like your standard stuff.

With users asking for recommendations and trading files of their chosen niche of adult entertainment. However, the other 50% of content on an on IB is basically just leaked nudes. And by that, we mean naked images of random, unsuspecting women posted and shared online. Yeah, because I think that's one of the key things to say about this. This hit headlines and everybody was talking about it after it happened to celebrities. This has been happening to and is continuing to happen to ordinary women on the regular. And it was just when it happened to Jennifer Lawrence. It was headline news.

Do you remember that Tumblr that was called Women Eating on the Tube? Yes. That terrified. Oh, no. For years. Oh, my God. You should just eat on the tube but always be doing this. And you can't see what I'm doing, listeners.

Just stick a middle finger in the air and just keep eating. So if it does get taken a picture of and they put it on there, you kind of win? Yeah, I was actually speaking to a friend of mine who's a doctor about this. And she was saying, she was like, to be honest, I was. wouldn't eat on the tube anyway. It's fucking gross. There's also that. Don't eat on the tube. I didn't want to say it. The thing that disgust me more than anything is when people eat bananas and they take all

of the skin off the banana and then hold the banana in their hand. I'm like, it comes with a holder. Why have you de-gloved that banana and then put it in your filthy little hand? Oh my God. Disgusting. I once saw a doctor do it and I was like, I'm leaving. Oh, no. Medical degree revoked.

Chaw sacked. So when these absolute bottom feeders manage to get hold of nudes of women, they call the images they post wins. Ugh, losers. And so-called collectors pride themselves on having an enormous database of images of wins from specific areas around the world. They trade these images for Bitcoin and or other pictures and show off by occasionally posting a massive dump of leaked nudes

from a specific town or city for everyone to. Oh, that's horrible. Sometimes, if they're really showing off, they'll post links to a specific woman's social media, maybe including where she works, or who she's married to. And then they'll post a whole bunch of explicit images of that woman and all have a very good laugh. And this is all clearly, utterly disgusting, but there is one question that is probably at the forefront of your mind hole. Where do they get these images from? Well, the vast majority of them are taken from an entire question.

are taken from an endless swill of explicit images that constantly circulate the internet. Perhaps some were originally sent in confidence to a boyfriend or a secret lover. And then that person sent that picture around a bunch of lads WhatsApp groups until those photos find themselves online. Users at a non-IB then spend their time tracking down the women in the images, like they work for fucking Task Force Argos or something. Working out their names and where they live, and then putting their nudes into a collection with other women in the same area.

This is what we meant about sourcing cataloging. And other images that are on this website are from things like OnlyFans creators or similar, who posted content online, which has then been stolen from their like behind a paywall accounts and circulated online. Speaking of OnlyFans, I was speaking to a friend of mine the other night who I know from Korea and she quite briefly but did teach English in prisons. And we were talking about the Onsworth incident. And she was like, I think she leaked it because she's got an only fans now. Yeah.

And the other thing she said was, so she was on a sex offender wing, right? And she was speaking to this guy that she was teaching English to. And you're not allowed to divulge any personal information, but she had dog hair on her and he was like, oh, do you have a dog? And she was like, okay, I think this is okay. She was like, yeah, like I have a dog and blah, blah, blah, blah. And like sometimes it can be tricky and she just, you know, you just can't tell her no sometimes. And this sex offender said, bit like me then.

Ew. Disgusting. Disgusting. When you said you were going to say something about maths, I thought you were going to tell everybody what you told me. But I think you told me on under the duvet. I did. Go listen to it there. So yeah, images sourced from multiple different places and these only fans ones that are stolen from people's accounts are especially valuable if this creator is no longer active.

So the content is much more difficult to obtain. So yeah, it's absolutely exactly what we said, right? They're collectors. And it's like, oh, this book is no longer in print. So therefore, if I get a copy, it's more valuable. And obviously the more famous the person, the bigger the win. It's so disgustingly lame. However, a small percentage of these images were stolen directly from the women themselves. And this took place in a small sub-community with an un-I-B called Stoll, short for, of course, stolen.

These users within this sub-community prided themselves on being able to access anyone's most intimate images or wins. and they did this via basic hacking or by straight up catfishing. And a majority of their victims, mostly women, weren't just picked at random. They would often be people within the user's own life, like a friend or even a family member. Other victims would be requested by another user, who would post the personal details of someone in their own life and beg for a collector to hack them. Users would then post something along the lines of,

Here's my slutty sister-in-law, accompanied by a bunch of interviews. images that they had gotten via the most despicable means. In early August, users on anon IB started talking about a major win. Now, before we told you what a win on anon IB was, most of you would probably be thinking that if chronically online basement dwellers have something to celebrate, it's probably because they found some kind of never-before-seen version of Pokemon. or a new way to perhaps combine Doritos and monster energy drinks.

I keep thinking about your builder drinking two cans of moisture. I think about it all the time and I wonder how there is still no work that's been done in two weeks. But now that we're all in the same boat, we understand exactly what these people mean by a major win. Sadly, a major win is exactly what it sounds like. For the next few weeks, a non-I.B quietly rumbled with anticipation. of what the Stole community had gotten their hands on. There were rumours of people paying huge amounts of money in Bitcoin for a collection of almost unbelievably explicit images

of some of the world's most famous celebrities. Names were being thrown around that seemed unthinkable. Jennifer Lawrence, Scarlett Johansson and Rihanna were stars that seemed untouchable. The idea that someone could have a picture of them naked was beyond belief. And yet, on the 31st of them, August, an enormous folder was posted on 4chan. For the majority of internet users who had never heard of a non-I-B, it was especially out of the blue and utterly mind-blowing.

A carefully organised catalogue of over 100 female celebrities and their most intimate pictures. It's not quite clear who posted them on 4chan. It almost certainly wasn't one of the original hackers. They were worth a huge amount of money when they were private and they lost all of their value when they became public. That's interesting. I'd never thought about that before. Once those pictures were out, there was absolutely no getting that genie back into the money bottle.

From 4chan, these images trickled their way onto Reddit, and at that point, it was open season. Like we said earlier, the first two images to hit the front page were Kate Upton and Jennifer Lawrence. But within minutes, most of the image dump that had hit 4chan was on Reddit too. And within hours, the event had been dubbed The Fappening. Ew. I hate that so much. Disgusting. A skeezy portmanteau of fapping, which is yank for wanking and The Happening, just in case you needed that spelling out for you. No, I didn't. The front page of Reddit was literally covered in the most unimaginably intimate pictures of everyone's favourite celebrities.

That day, over 150 million people visited Reddit's front page to see the leaks. In order to keep track of all of the images, a new subreddit dedicated to The Fappening was set up, and within 24 hours it had 100,000 subscribers, making it the fastest growing subreddit in the site's history. It was all snowballing out of control. As the leak spread from Reddit and then onto the likes of Twitter, now X, and Facebook, celebrities started to come forward and make statements. due to the incredibly explicit nature of the images, plus the fact that they had all clearly been taken by the individuals themselves,

it was difficult to deny their validity. Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Kaylee Kukho, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and Kirsten Dunst, all made statements confirming that the leaks were real. It is crazy to me that in this day and age when Photoshopped images, I guess this is like pre-generative AI in the way that everybody is obsessed with it now, But like, it was so obvious that they had to come out and say they were real. Like, I don't know that I wouldn't have just been able to be like, no, let's just keep saying they're fake.

They photoshop my face on. Like, that's crazy. And some people did follow my tactic. Others, including Ariana Grande, denied the authenticity of these photos. And lots more just said nothing at all. The biggest controversy came when Olympic gymnast, Michaela Maroney, initially denied the images were real, before then explaining that they were legitimate,

but that she had taken them when she was underage. Fucking hell. Oh, God. Naturally, this sent the whole situation into total meltdown, as hundreds, if not thousands of people, had now viewed and shared naked images of a child. Reddit moderators first began banning anyone who posted the images of Moroni on the fappening subreddit

before eventually shutting down the subreddit entirely. And from there, the excitement fizzled away as quickly as it had started. With the knowledge that Moroni's images were stored within most of the image dumps, it became impossible to download them without committing a serious crime. And shortly afterwards, when a court case was launched against Google for hosting the images in their search results, they became significantly harder to find. A few weeks later, several more leaks were posted on an on-I-B and 4chan,

but with the fear of serious prosecution looming large, these images didn't have anywhere near the same impact. But while the images themselves might have been a relative flash in the pan, it still left a lot of unanswered questions. For a start, how the fuck did these photos come into the public domain? At first, in a pretty major PR disaster, the leaks were blamed on Apple's iCloud service. However, both the FBI and Apple

launched massive investigations into the source of the images and found that neither Apple nor Android phones were the issue. It turned out the problem had been much more low-tech. We've said before hacking is a lot less hacking into the mainframe than people expect. And it's true. The majority of day-to-day hacks come from people freely giving up their usernames and passwords

and then having their personal information stolen. And that's exactly what happened here. In a practice known as fishing with a pH, users on a non-I-B sent emails and text messages purporting to be from Apple or Android to the celebrities in question. In these messages, they told their victims that there was an issue with their account

and they needed to send over their username and password so that it could be fixed. Never ever do that. Stop it right this second. It is terrifying. that anybody has done that. I feel like even every single bank now will be like... Don't do it. We won't call you. We won't ask for this.

Yeah, we will never ask you for etc. Yeah. Naturally, celebrities are nervous of having their personal information leaked, so they were prime targets to give over their details in a moment of panic. Imagine if you're fucking Kate Upton's PA and you replied to that. No. Once the hackers had the details, they logged into the Apple. or the Android accounts of the celebrities

and either backed up their phone to another device or downloaded images, which their victims had stored on the cloud. The reality is the hackers from a non-I-B, probably just got lucky once. They found some random celebrities details online, perhaps by an old Facebook post or something, and from there it was just a case of sending the right email

to trick them into giving their login details. And then, they not only had access to the photos, but also the celebrity's contacts, which were full of. other celebrities. And then they were off to the races. Fucking out. I just watched the three-part Netflix documentary on the Ashley Madison scandal. It's well worth everybody's time to watch it. It's actually really, really good. It's very interesting. And yeah, that hack, it is. There's something else, that's for sure.

So given the low-tech hacking, they're taking place here, the FBI didn't actually find it that hard to track down the perpetrators of these leaks. The majority of the fishing emails could be traced back to five individuals. Ryan Collins of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Edward Majesik of Chicago, George Garifano of North Branford, Connecticut, Emilio Herrera, also of Chicago, and Christopher Brannan of Virginia. All five were taken to court by unnamed celebrity clients, and all five were charged in trials that took place very much behind closed doors. The longest sentence was given to Christopher Brannon. Brannan is an ex-teacher,

who not only hacked the celebrities, but also other teachers and students at his school, as well as his own underage sister-in-law. Sounds like a nice guy. Brannan was given a sentence, however, of just 34 months in prison for aggravated identity theft. I've never heard of that before. And also for unauthorised access to a protected computer,

and this all happened in March 2019. Edward Magisic received the shortest sentence, just nine months behind bars, and a $5,000 restitution payment. So where does that leave us? With the bad guys locked up and a non-IBE's sleazy community exposed to the world, has this grotesque culture of sharing women's most private images,

like trading cards, come to an end? No. Shortly. An on IB is very much still alive and kicking. The site is still dedicated to porn and still has a thriving community of collectors from all around the world. There are now individual message boards

for specific states around the US and even boards for the UK on Australia too. And on these boards, users still trade and share explicit images of women in their area, asking for women from a certain town or city and even requesting certain women by their names.

Oh my God. So yeah, it's all pretty fucking rough. But what can we do about it? Well, for a start, if you know that explicit material of you or someone you know has been shared online, report it to the police. Despite some government's best efforts, revenge porn is illegal and will often be taken seriously by the police. If you're not sure whether an image you've sent or that you've taken has ended up online, you can use Google's reverse image search to see if it pops up and take action if you find. it though I'd be really scared to take an image like that and then put it into Google

reverse image search. I'm like, is it now on the internet? But if you do do this, if the images are hosted on an actual porn site rather than a chat room or image board, contact the site and ask for it to be taken down immediately. While mainstream porn sites might like to have you believe that they're untouchable, they are all absolutely terrified of litigation and we'll bend over backwards to make sure you don't take legal action. If the images, however, are on a chat, or image board, do not engage or post asking for them to be taken down, as this is likely to lead to trolling and can make the situation worse. Just go to the police and let them take it from there.

If you don't think that images of you are online but want to make sure they don't end up there, here's what you can do. The very boring answer is don't take or send explicit material to people, but like, get real, everyone does it. The most efficient way to make sure that a naked picture of you can't end up online, line is to not take it in the first place, obviously, but that's just not going to happen. The reality is sexy pictures are a part of a modern relationship and we are not here to stop you. Normalised nudes, I've said it before.

The most important advice we can give is don't send intimate pictures to anyone you don't deeply trust. If you think there's a chance that the lad you've been chirping on Snapchat might take a screenshot and send it to his mates, then just don't send it. It's not worth it and once it's out there, it ain't coming back. Like we said earlier, earlier, the majority of nudes on a non-IB and everywhere else on the internet were sent consensually, and then they got spread around without their knowledge or consent. That said, that's not the case for all of them. Some of these images were stolen, and if jail law can get stung, so can you, my friend. So let's quickly talk about how you can avoid

getting hacked. Again, like we said before, the majority of hacks come from people giving their login information to hackers without much fuss. The golden rule is that no site whether it be a bank or social media, will ask you to send them your login information. No one will ever do that. If you ever get an email saying that your account has been compromised and that you need to change your login information, do not click the link that is in their email.

Advanced hackers can replicate webpages to look like they're official. And when you go ahead and reset your password, you're actually just sending it straight to them. So if you think someone's trying to get in, go directly to the site in question via a new browser tab and reset your password from there. And lastly, just to enable two-factor authentication. It's a pain in the ass. It's a total ballade typing in a shitty little code every time you want to log into your iCloud.

But it's a lot less stress and a lot less of a ballache than having your tits plastered across the internet. Yeah, be careful. Especially if you're a teenager. Listen, when we're like, do what you want as part of it, It's part of an adult relationship. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you are a teenager, do not send anybody nudes of yourself. Just don't do it.

Don't do it. Wait until you're like 26 and your brain's fully developed, have a big thing and then do it. But don't ever give anyone your password.