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Pippa Middleton iCloud hack suspect released on bail

The Duchess of Cambridge's sister is latest celebrity to have photos stolen from her iCloud account.

Katie Collins Senior European Correspondent
Katie a UK-based news reporter and features writer. Officially, she is CNET's European correspondent, covering tech policy and Big Tech in the EU and UK. Unofficially, she serves as CNET's Taylor Swift correspondent. You can also find her writing about tech for good, ethics and human rights, the climate crisis, robots, travel and digital culture. She was once described a "living synth" by London's Evening Standard for having a microchip injected into her hand.
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Pippa Middleton discovers that technology isn't always your friend.

 Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images

A man was arrested and then released on bail Sunday, following a possible hack of an Apple iCloud account belonging to Pippa Middleton, sister of Duchess of Cambridge Kate Middleton.

About 3,000 images were stolen from the hacked account, the UK-based Sun newspaper reported, including pictures of the duchess' young children Prince George and Princess Charlotte, who are third and fourth in line to the British throne. The newspaper claims it was approached via WhatsApp by a hacker who was trying to sell the photos for a minimum of £50,000 ($65,000 or AU$85,000).

Middleton joins a long list of celebrities who have had personal photos stolen from their Apple-run cloud storage accounts.

Scotland Yard, the London Metropolitan Police's headquarters, does not expose the names of victims, but confirmed to CNET that an arrest associated with the Computer Misuse Act was made late Sunday in the county of Northamptonshire. The legislation is designed to protect computer users in the UK from cyberattacks and theft of their information.

"A man arrested by detectives investigating the hacking of a personal iCloud account has been bailed," police said in a statement. The 35-year-old man must report to a police station in south London in late November pending further inquiries.