Angelina Jolie and Robert De Niro 'have private details released in biggest leak ever seen'
Massive Hollywood stars like Angelina Jolie and Robert De Niro have had their personal details leaked in a data breach, it has been claimed.
Cybersecurity expert Jeremiah Fowler told The Sun that private phone numbers and email addresses of a host of big-name celebrities had been made publicly accessible online in 'by far the biggest collection of celebrity data I’ve ever seen'.
Mr Fowler discovered the leak, with the data coming from 666,369 files relating to the Tribeca Film Festival, the brainchild of movie royalty Robert De Niro and launched in 2002. He says he saw both De Niro and Jolie's information.
They're not the only ones who have allegedly had their data leaked, either.
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Famed directors Martin Scorsese, Danny Boyle and George Lucas have also reportedly fallen victim to the leak, as well as actors Rami Malek, Sharon Stone, Neil Patrick Harris and Michael Douglas.
'By far the biggest collection of celebrity data I’ve ever seen'
Mr Fowler says all the stars could have been exposed to online crooks and fraudsters as a result.
The researcher at US company Black Hills Information Security told The Sun on Sunday: "There were many, many household names in the records who could have been targeted with malware. There were names, phone numbers and email addresses."
What caused the data breach?
Mr Fowler believes the leak was a result of human error and contacted Tribeca soon after discovering the breach, just before the annual festival got underway in New York last month.
The exposed databases were then removed from public access, though it's not clear how long they were online for.
He then claims he was sent an email on June 4 from a legal executive at the festival's parent company, Tribeca Enterprises, who said they were 'actively investigating this issue'.
'These individuals are so guarded and they protect their personal privacy, their contacts, their phone numbers'
"They responded pretty quickly, so it was obvious they knew what it was and that it shouldn’t have been there," Mr Fowler said.
"It’s really unique because these individuals are so guarded and they protect their personal privacy, their contacts, their phone numbers."
A source told The Sun that the vast majority of the contact details leaked were actually for the talents' agents and managers, rather than the celebrities' personal details.
However, Mr Fowler believes there was an indication that they were, in fact, personal as he says many of the addresses used domains like Gmail and Yahoo, rather than company-specific ones.
Though he warned that hackers with that sort of information could impersonate celebrities and send malware to their friends and family, it doesn't appear that anything of the sort has happened.
Writing in a blog post, he added: “Usually, when something has been exposed for a long period of time, you’ll see evidence of ransomware, or criminals will put in an automated ransomware note.
“I didn’t see anything like that. It’s possible that other people have seen it and just didn’t see that file.”
LADbible Group has approached the Tribeca Festival and the representatives of Angelina Jolie, Robert De Niro, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Sharon Stone, Rami Malek, Danny Boyle, Neil Patrick Harris, and Michael Douglas for comment.
Topics: Celebrity News, Celebrity, Film, Technology
Daniel Murphy