Private photos of Pippa Middleton, the sister of the Duchess of Cambridge and Prince William's wife Kate, were reportedly stolen by an anonymous computer hacker, reaching to up to 3000 images, according to Britain's Press Association news agency.
The Daily Mail reported that images from the Apple iCloud storage account of Kate Middleton's sister were unlawfully hacked, which included royalty photos of Kate and William's children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte.
Pippa's lawyers just released a statement, confirming her account was accessed by some computer hackers and that they are trying to sell the private photos to publications in the United States because of the U.K. privacy laws.
Additional photos revealed by the photo thieves included party photos and Pippa fitting wedding dresses. The hackers even dug deeper as they sent her nude photos of her fiancé, financier James Matthews. The cyber thief got in touch with Pippa via an encrypted messaging service and used the pseudonym "Crafty Cockney," The Sun reported. The stolen images were subsequently posted online which alarmed Pippa and her sister's royal family.
The hacker was said to have initiated a negotiation through an email, selling the photos back to Pippa, demanding a minimum of £50,000 (around $65,000) within 48 hours, as of Friday afternoon.
The alleged thief's identity is still unknown and it is speculated that the hacker surfaces two years after the big issue where a number of celebrities, which included "Hunger Games" star Jennifer Lawrence, fell victim to a hacker attack on the iCloud in 2014. iCloud stores private photos from phones and computers.
This incident of Pippa Middleton's stolen photos follows the news that 500 million people were compromised as their accounts in Yahoo were hacked in the same year, 2014. The tech company suspects a "state-sponsored" actor hacked into its network in 2014 and stole other details. He said stolen information included names, email addresses, telephone numbers, and dates of birth of Yahoo users. The company said that payment data and bank account information were however spared.
