FBI catches Hannah's hacker

2008-10-22 12:01

Belinda Goldsmith

Los Angeles - A 19-year-old hacker who posted some racy photos of Disney starlet Miley Cyrus on the internet said he was raided by the FBI this week after boasting that he would never be caught.

The hacker, Josh Holly, bragged openly about obtaining the photos from an email account of the 15-year-old star of Hannah Montana, the hit Disney Channel series about a schoolgirl with a secret life as a pop star.

He even gave interviews to bloggers and boasted that he moved so often that authorities would never catch him.

But Holly told Wired.com that the FBI found him on Monday, seizing three computers and a phone from his home in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. He was not arrested or charged.

"I was just kind of shaking. I was thrown way off guard," he told Wired.com. "I guess somebody ended up ratting me out."

Images embarrassed singer

The FBI in Tennessee did not respond to calls for comment, according to Wired.com and other media reports.

Holly, who goes by the screen name "TrainReq", gained access to an email account once used by Cyrus last December, and found images of the actress with a bare midriff and blowing kisses that she supposedly sent to singer Nick Jonas of the Jonas Brothers.

Acccording to internet reports, no celebrity outlets would buy the photos from him due to the illegal manner in which he obtained them so he posted them online and they spread across the internet.

An embarrassed Cyrus, whose squeaky-clean image has been carefully managed by Disney, publicly apologised for the photos, saying they were "silly, inappropriate shots".

- Reuters