Hacker Admits to Spamming from Stars’ MySpace Accounts

A hacker named Josh Holly, aged 19 years, has admitted that he gained unauthorized access to the MySpace accounts belonging to celebrities and groups like Rihanna, Chris Brown, Fall Out Boy, and Linkin Park, and used them to carry out illegal spamming operations. Holly also confessed to the FBI agent of regularly compromising accounts ever since 2005.

The teenager, who accessed the administrative panel of MySpace, said he managed to hack the account password of the aforementioned celebrities. Having done that, he used those accounts to send e-mails to every address on the contact list of a MySpace account, promoting a call service or ringtone.

For instance, Holly sent an e-mail from the MySpace account of 'Fall Out Boy' claiming that fans would get a call from the band and receive a ringtone provided they follow a hyperlink and feed in their details. At first, Holly's advertising affiliates for whom he worked did not know about Holly's activity, but when they came to know about it, they terminated his services for spamming innocent recipients.

Meanwhile, an examination of the bank records of Holly revealed that during November 2007-July 2008, he earned a huge sum of money $110,000 that he shared with his Israel-based associate who is known to have helped Holly in his spamming operation.

Furthermore, Holly is blamed for breaking into the Gmail account of the famous actress Miley Cyrus. As per reports, the FBI raided Holly's apartment in October 2008 when he admitted that he stole Cyrus' private photos from her account and put them up online in 2008 that resulted in a small scandal surrounding the teen star.

Meanwhile, waiting for the next stand by FBI, Holly said that once he appears in court, he wouldn't be able to plead 'not guilty', as reported by Wired in the end week of February 2009. Holly regretted that there was no way for him to escape and even Michael Jackson's lawyers could not rescue him. He called himself an idiot for not deleting his hard-drive and added that the persecutors would get all the evidence against his action and words.

Related article: Hacker & Virus in MySpace

» SPAMfighter News - 3/10/2009