Hollywood Leaks: the new hacking threat to celebs

Movie stars, singers and other glitterati: beef up your email passwords! A new offshoot of infamous hackers Anonymous, styling itself 'Hollywood Leaks', is rampaging through Tinseltown, wreaking destruction and embarrassment.

Casualties include Gucci Gucci rapper Kreayshawn (above). As she was appearing at the MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday night, hackers posted nude photos of her on her own Twitter feed to her 300,000 followers, prompting her to complain: "My twitter got hacked today by some anti-Hollywood extremists."

Kreayshawn claimed the pictures had been taken when she was underage, but the hackers say the singer took them in 2009 and sent them to rapper Lil B, with whom she has collaborated.

But while it may be humiliating for the star, it seems unlikely to do her career much harm: she has enjoyed a massive spike in searches for her name on Google since the leak.

Also up in arms is Cris Judd (Jennifer Lopez's ex-husband), who had his mobile number posted online. "To get into someone's personal information and blast it online for pure humiliation and enjoyment - it's not right. It's like identity theft," he told the New York Daily News.

Perhaps the group's biggest scoop is the complete script to the upcoming film version of the musical Rock of Ages, which is to star Tom Cruise. The film's director, Peter Shankman, had apparently emailed the script to the cast.

The hackers harvested the script from the email account of a minor player – and put it up for free download on the Pirate Bay file-sharing site.

And who are these masked men? Hollywood Leaks claim, on their Twitter feed, to be a less-politically motivated scion of the loose-knit hacking collective Anonymous. Their mission is "to facilitate the free flow of information from a place which was previously overlooked, Hollywood", a spokesman told Gawker. ·