The on- and offline search for the prime suspect in last month’s celebrity nude-photo hacking scandal.

The on- and offline search for the prime suspect in last month’s celebrity nude-photo hacking scandal.

"While two sources close to Bryan and the family believe he bought (though none could explain where the money would have come from) and distributed the pictures from the original hackers, the conventional wisdom seems to suggest that the actual hacks took place over multiple years and are the result of active trading."

I didn't even know of the underground trading rings until the Fappening I leaks, but my impression is that nobody, not amateur internet detectives nor real law enforcement investigators, has yet turned up anyone who did the original "hacking" into the compromised accounts. Was it one guy? Ten? Fifty? Nobody seems to know, or at least nobody who knows is telling. That leads me to suspect that the pictures went through many, many hands before they went public starting on Labor Day weekend, and that investigators would have to follow a long chain of transfers before finding the "source zero" for the leaks, a process made more complicated by the fact that each compromised account may theoretically have been broken into by a different guy. Those who possessed the pictures before they became public are reputed to be "traders," which implies that several different parties must have had something to trade. (Although that reputation itself may be yet another subterfuge created to disguise the truth, or just something created in idle speculation by people far removed from the person or people who broke into the accounts.)