Third batch of naked celeb photos leaked

They were photographs taken in private, but that hasn't stopped a third batch of naked images of celebrities being leaked online.

Photos of model Cara Delevingne and actresses Anna Kendrick and Jennifer Lawrence have hit Reddit and 4Chan, according to The Daily Beast.

Reports say Kendrick is fully clothed in the pictures.

Other celebrities are also claimed to have been targeted including US Olympic gold medallist Misty May Treanor.

Pictures of actress Anna Kendrick are reported to have hit Reddit and 4Chan

Dubbed "The Fappening", the series of leaks seems to have developed real momentum since the first one took place a month ago, much to the concern of women's rights campaigners.

What is Fappening?

The term is a mixture of two words, 'the happening', as in what's going on, and 'fapping', which is slang for masturbation.

Fappening is where a hacker accesses naked photographs of celebrities and then leaks them on to image sharing sites like 4Chan in exchange for Bitcoins.

But how are hackers accessing the photos?

We currently don't know. It had been claimed that hackers managed to break into celebrities' iCloud accounts, but Apple have denied any form of security breach. The company instead claims accounts were "compromised by a very targeted attack on user names, passwords and security questions".

However, even if these leaks have nothing to do with iCloud's security, the situation had highlighted that accounts had an unlimited number of security question attempts.

Apple has since tightened its security to prevent so-called Brute Force attacks, which consists of systematically checking all possible passwords until the correct one is found.

What have the celebrities involved said?

Many of the women who have been targeted have not spoken publically about it, Newsbeat has contacted Anna Kendrick, Cara Delevingne and Jennifer Lawrence but have not received a response so far.

Speaking after the first leak, Anna Kendrick told a news agency that it left her feeling "paranoid", even though at that point she had not been affected.

Around the same time, Anna also tweeted an image of a text message her brother Mike had sent her saying how glad he was his sister's account had not been hacked. The 29-year-old actress jokingly replied they would only find "photos of food and other people's dogs".

Someone who wanted to make her feelings known after the first leak was horror movie actress Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who tweeted that the "private" photos which had been hacked were taken years ago with her husband. Her message to the "creepy" hackers was: "I hope you feel great about yourselves."

Kim Kardashian spoke to Newsbeat after the original iCloud hack at the start of September but before she was affected by the second leak.

She said: "I think it's a big wake up call for people to make sure they have every privacy setting."

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