The photos were being passed around privately for at least a couple of weeks before their public release on August 31. Court documents from 2014 indicated that one user created a fake email account called 'appleprivacysecurity' to ask celebrities for security information. It was initially believed that the images were obtained using an exploit in the Find My iPhone service. Apple later reported that the victims' iCloud account information was obtained using 'a very targeted attack on user names, passwords and security questions', such as phishing and brute-force attack guessing. The images were obtained via the online storage offered by Apple's iCloud platform for automatically backing up photos from iOS devices, such as iPhones. 'Celebgate' is a reference to the Watergate scandal. The term has received criticism from journalists like Radhika Sanghani of The Daily Telegraph and Toyin Owoseje of the International Business Times, who said that the term not only trivialized the leak, but also, according to Sanghani, ' light of a very severe situation.' Both articles used the term extensively to describe the event, including in their headlines. Though the term is a vulgarism originating either with the imageboards where the pictures were initially posted or Reddit, mainstream media outlets soon adopted the term themselves, such as the BBC. 'The Fappening' is a jocular portmanteau coined by combining the words ' fap', an internet slang term for masturbation, and the title of the 2008 film The Happening. The leak also prompted increased concern from analysts surrounding the privacy and security of cloud computing services such as iCloud-with a particular emphasis on their use to store sensitive, private information.

Critics felt the distribution of the images was a major invasion of privacy for their subjects, while some of the allegedly depicted subjects denied their authenticity. The incident was met with a varied reaction from the media and fellow celebrities. Apple claimed in a press release that access was gained via spear phishing attacks. The images were initially believed to have been obtained via a breach of Apple's cloud services suite iCloud, or a security issue in the iCloud API which allowed them to make unlimited attempts at guessing victims' passwords. The leak has been popularly dubbed The Fappening and also Celebgate. On August 31, 2014, a collection of almost 500 private pictures of various celebrities, mostly women, with many containing nudity, were posted on the imageboard 5chan, and later disseminated by other users on websites and social networks such as Imgur and Reddit.

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