As the online hunt for the people responsible for yesterday’s massive continues, some Redditors and security researchers have pointed to Bryan Hamade, a 27-year-old American Web Developer from Lawrenceville, Georgia, as the culprit for the massive celebrity nude photo leak involving pictures Hunger Games star of Jennifer Lawrence among other celebrities.
According to a picture that’s circulating on the photo-sharing site Imgur, Hamade — who goes by the the username BluntMastermind — posted a screenshot of his computer to show off the leaked picture folder, accidentally exposing his hard drive and network drive. A few Redditors then went through Hamade’s previous Reddit posts and recognized the hard drive and PC name, outing Hamade as the one responsible for the original 4chan leaks.
But Hamade vehemently denied the claims in an interview with BuzzFeed this morning.
“I am not behind this. It was so stupid — I saw a lot of people posting the actual leaks and bitcoin addresses and I’ve read a lot about bitcoin and how they’re are valuable and I thought, oh cool I’ll get free bitcoins,” he mentioned in an interview with BuzzFeed.
“I am just an idiot who tried to pull one over on 4chan and lost big time and stupidly left this identifying information. They took my proof and back traced it — it isn’t remotely true. I am not a hacker. I have no idea how the hell someone could hack into all those accounts,” he said.
Hamade, speaking on the phone as he was driving around trying to find an open law office so he could hire a lawyer, told BuzzFeed he and his family have been harassed by 4chan users since his allegedly Photoshopped post went live.
“It’s been a nightmare and I haven’t slept in 34 hours, now. 4chan users are harassing me with non-stop phone calls and emails. They email me constantly, emailing saying they’ll hack my personal websites and keep calling my phone, calling me a fag and then hanging up. They also said they’ll hack my mom’s site, so I took it down,” he said.
According to Hamade, who has been trying to find the alleged original leaker to clear his own name, it’s possible the leaker of the photo sets and those who actually breached the hacked iCloud accounts are entirely different people.
“The real guy is on 4chan posting intermittently. He’s most likely the one behind it, but it does seem the photos passed around to multiple people before being leaked, so it may just be someone who has them and didn’t hack to get them. They seem to have amassed a huge collection trading picture for picture and it’s possible that whoever they sold it to started leaking the pictures yesterday — at least that’s what it seems like,” Hamade said.
Hamade effort to make money from the pictures have proved futile.
A screenshot sent to from a deleted Reddit threat shows Hamade — under his username, BluntMastermind — arguing with another Redditor over the timestamp of the post in order to take credit for the leak.
We are still monitoring the realtime feed of the leaks over at reddit, there are currently over 129942 viewers on that live stream.
