The saga of the illegally obtained nude photos of dozens of celebrities has taken a darker turn. According to Reddit administrators, photos of gymnast McKayla Maroney and MTV actress Liz Lee, shared to 130,000 people on popular forum r/TheFappening, constitute child pornography. 
 
 Maroney’s lawyers have confirmed that the illegally obtained photos were taken while the gymnast was underage. The attorneys’ letter, sent to Porn.com and other websites, demands that the images be removed. 
 
 Additionally, Reddit users have been sharing revenge-porn photos of the actress Liz Lee, whose photos were not part of the initial leaks, but were taken and leaked by her boyfriend when Lee was 16. 
 
 The ongoing leak—dubbed #CelebGate, or more distastefully, “the Fappening”—includes naked photos of A-listers including Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton. It’s prompted outrage, and threats of legal actions from the women targeted. It has since emerged that the photos of at least one of the celebrities were taken when they were under 18. 
 
 The Reddit community r/TheFappening has become the main hub for the leaked photos, due to the fact that Reddit is one of the few mainstream websites that isn’t proactively deleting all links to them. In an urgent post, the subreddit’s moderators warn the community that the site’s admins have informed them that Maroney was underage in the photos “and that we quickly need to remove them. 
 
 “If we don’t remove them,” moderator SickOrSane continues, “this subreddit will most likely be banned, very quickly.” 
 
 The moderator also warns against sharing Lee’s photos, which are apparently also being posted on the subreddit. 
 
 
 
 
 
 Redditors have immediately begun to panic, discussing the potential implications of their downloading and sharing child pornography. 
 
 
 
 
 
 Despite the proliferation of child pornography across r/TheFappening—in addition to the stolen intimate photos of adult celebrities—the Reddit admins have chosen not to remove the community, apparently content to let the moderators sort it out instead. They have, however, hidden the forum from r/all, a list of all content on Reddit. 
 
 
 
 
 
 The focus, throughout the subreddit, is the potential ramifications community members may face for possessing child porn. 
 
 Here, redditors respond to Classiest_Erection with step-by-step instructions for how to use software to wipe his hard drive, which ostensibly contains illegally obtained underage nudes. We’re watching a crime being aided and abetted in real time. 
 
 In another instance, notwhoyouthinimnot goes out of his way to proactively encourage redditors to remove all record of their criminal activity. 
 
 Other community members are only too eager to help. 
 
 
 
 
 
 Some are more concerned with the fact that their community may be banned than the fact it’s being used to share flagrantly illegal material. 
 
 The moderators, meanwhile, are joking about the fact that child porn has been found on their community. (The linked photo in the screenshot below is not pornographic.) 
 
 Reddit admins may yet change course and decide to ban r/TheFappening. Even though redditors are using the site to instruct one another how to hide evidence of the child porn they downloaded via Reddit, administrators seem happy to allow the community to exist. 
 
 It still remains unclear how the photos were leaked, though Apple has strongly denied early reports that hackers gained access to them through a vulnerability in iCloud. 
 
 Photo via teuobk/Flickr (CC BY 2.0) | Remix by Fernando Alfonso III ||||| McKayla Maroney I Was Underage in Hacked Nude Pics 
 
 McKayla Maroney -- I Was Underage in Hacked Nude Photos 
 
 EXCLUSIVE 
 
 Olympic gymnastsays she was under 18 when the hacked nude photos of her were taken ... and now she's taking legal action against several porn sites that reposted the images.TMZ has learned one of Maroney's attorneys fired off a letter to Porn.com ... informing the site that McKayla was underage in several of the photos. The letter demands the images of McKayla -- who turned 18 last December -- be taken down immediately.Another attorney for the gymnast sent a different letter to multiple websites stating Maroney owns the copyright on the hacked photos.The legal claims by her attorneys are a strong indication the photos really do show McKayla -- even though she said on Twitter they were "fake photos." It's also possible only portions of the images are really McKayla. The letter is not specific.A rep for Porn.com tells us they immediately removed the pics once they got the letter from Maroney's attorney. ||||| Two years ago, tech writer Mat Honan wrote a blockbuster story for Wired, describing how a child got into his iCloud account and briefly ruined his life. You may have heard that the same thing recently happened to some very famous women, almost certainly using the same method. Apple is making it easy for you to be next. 
 
 In a bit of perfunctory apologia performed after the leak of dozens of naked private celebrity photos, Apple says it's not their fault: 
 
 We wanted to provide an update to our investigation into the theft of photos of certain celebrities. When we learned of the theft, we were outraged and immediately mobilized Apple's engineers to discover the source. Our customers' privacy and security are of utmost importance to us. After more than 40 hours of investigation, we have discovered that certain celebrity accounts were compromised by a very targeted attack on user names, passwords and security questions, a practice that has become all too common on the Internet. None of the cases we have investigated has resulted from any breach in any of Apple's systems including iCloud® or Find my iPhone. We are continuing to work with law enforcement to help identify the criminals involved. To protect against this type of attack, we advise all users to always use a strong password and enable two-step verification. Both of these are addressed on our website at http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4232 
 
 This statement, which probably had several thousand pairs of lawyer eyeballs on it before it was sent to the press, is slippery. It hinges on very particular readings of words like "breach." Apple insists its iCloud service—which it touts as a seamless way of backing up your entire digital existence—was not "breached." This is maybe true in the sense that the celebrity nude traders didn't break or manipulate Apple code, but false and horribly misleading in the sense that they easily gamed Apple's system. And as Mat Honan will tell you, it's been that easy to get around for well over two years. 
 
 To fix this, Apple could have simply forced everyone to use two-factor verification for their accounts. It's easy, and would have probably prevented all of this. But Apple didn't do that (though you should still do it for yourself). 
 
 So, in the meantime, want to know how to get into someone's iCloud? It's this easy. Tell Apple you forgot that person's password, and then guess their security questions with readily available biographical information other Silicon Valley corporations have goaded us all into sharing. 
 
 But even as it acknowledges that its systems are easy prey for basic social engineering—a handful of Google or Facebook searches and a winning manner on the phone—Apple would like you to believe that you're not at risk. The celebrities whose private photos are now all over the internet, it declares, were victims of a "very targeted attack"—exposed only because they're public figures. 
 
 It's true that Kate Upton and Jennifer Lawrence were victims of a "very targeted attack." But the idea that only celebrities are being targeted is horseshit. There are people out there ripping the iCloud accounts of ordinary people, right now. iCloud will betray you whether you're McKayla Maroney or a kindergarten teacher. 
 
 Over at AnonIB, a message board where the Jennifer Lawrence leak was possibly first floated, a band of "iCloud rippers" share the photos they've stolen from girls who are certainly not celebrities. 
 
 Friends, coworkers, classmates, and most of all, strangers: these rippers take requests from other AnonIB users (NSFW). In one AnonIB post, dated June 30th of this year, we see the following: 
 
 If there's any possible way, there's a very good chance of obtaining win from this girl I know. I have her password, and I've seen via icloud control panel that she has a 3.4gb incomplete backup. Hoping there's a way to rip whatever was backed up. 
 
 Another user asks for aid: "I downloaded it and tried to look up my ex's nudes, but it won't let me open the backup, any help?" 
 
 An AnonIB veteran is there to help: 
 
 To rip an Icloud you first need the email and password for the acct. How do you get the email/pass? well thats pretty easy actually. You just need some very basic info that can usually be found on FB, Twitter, Instagram, Myspace, etc. and follow these 7 steps... 
 
 This guy has it down to a science: 
 
 Man I know the heart break lol All that hard work and nothing to show for it. But the best thing about Icloud is that they can always add a backup later. So just because you struck out today doesn't mean you shouldn't try again in a few months. All the backups I got into personally I rip on a schedule. January (Because girls get wild for christmas and new years) April (Spring Break pics and tanning/work out pics cuz girls trying to get ready for summer) August (End of summer and beginning of school yr) November 1 (After Halloween) 
 
 The thread is full of looted photos of absolute nobodies, given away for free. To them, it's a sport or hobby. It's absolutely not a "targeted attack"—it's a casual free-for-all, taking advantage of Apple's pathetic security system. And this is just one website on a very big internet. 
 
 Apple won't acknowledge how vulnerable iCloud is, of course—not with new iPhones to unveil in exactly a week. And really, do you think the company that told us to hold our defective iPhones differently will admit your naked sexts are easy to steal? This is the house of arrogance that Steve Jobs built, and it's on the verge of releasing a new version of iOS that backs up not just your last 1,000 iPhone photos, but all of them, along with your digitized health data. This is the last company on Earth you should want feeling too proud to admit it fucked up. 
 
 Image by Jim Cooke 
 
 To contact the author of this post, write to biddle@gawker.com
– Some Internet users who started out gleeful about the leak of celebrities' nude photos are now busy trying to scrub their hard drives of child porn. Lawyers for McKayla Maroney, who turned 18 in December, say the Olympic gymnast was under 18 when the photos of her were taken and demanded that porn websites remove the images, reports TMZ. Maroney had initially tweeted that the photos were fakes. At Reddit, users of a forum that has been used to share leaked pics have been warned that some pictures of Maroney and MTV star Liz Lee were taken when they were underage and if they're not deleted, "this subreddit will most likely be banned, very quickly." The warning was followed by panicked discussion of how to erase the images, reports the Daily Dot, which describes efforts to advise users how to "remove all record of their criminal activity" as the "aiding and abetting" of a crime. The Prostate Cancer Foundation, meanwhile, has decided to return thousands of dollars donated by users of the same subreddit as "guilt money" for viewing the celeb photos, rather crudely " in honor of Jennifer Lawrence " (Gawker has the explanation here). "Guys, we're literally worse than cancer," one user wrote after the donations were returned, as per the Washington Post. (Apple says the leak wasn't a result of "any breach in ... iCloud or Find My iPhone.")