Are celebs the newest target for hackers?

Last week, hackers allegedly stole nude photos from actress Scarlett Johansson and then plastered them all over the Internet. Before then it was the rapper Kreayshawn, who wrote on her blog that her Twitter account was hacked in August when naked photos of her showed up there. In March, Vanessa Hudgens of "High School Musical" underwent a similar ordeal after photos were reportedly stolen from her Gmail account.

Finally, in December, police in Germany alleged two young men had used computer-hacking skills to get access to the e-mail accounts and photos of more than 50 celebrities, according to Britain's The Telegraph, including the likes of Lady Gaga and Ke$ha. In the wake of all this juicy Hollywood hoopla, people have started to assume these photo leaks are the newest front in the so-called "hacktivist" wars, as waged by big-name hacking rings such as Anonymous and LulzSec. Those groups have claimed responsibility for taking down bank and government websites. But security experts said connections between celeb hacks and groups such as Anonymous are thin or nonexistent.

The first real case of a celebrity attack was in 2005 when hackers logged into Paris Hilton's phone and stole photos of her, said Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure, another computer security company. Those hackers reportedly were able to break into Hilton's phone by correctly guessing the not-so-secret answer to her security question, which was "tinkerbell," the name of her pet Chihuahua. The real issue here, the researchers said, is the prevalence, and accessibility of, nude photos.

If celebrities didn't take and store nude photos of themselves on their phones or on computers, they wouldn't be stolen and published online. Who is behind the recent string of stolen celebrity photos -- and how exactly they got them -- remains unclear. The FBI office in Los Angeles has opened an investigation into the incidents of computer hacking but declined to elaborate on the cases involved.

Some people have pointed to a supposedly new hacker ring called Hollywood Leaks, which operates a Twitter feed to discuss these sorts of incidents.

On Monday, the group wrote that it didn't have anything to do with the Johansson photos: "WE DID NOT LEAK THE SCARLETT JOHANSSON PICS, WE WOULD HAVE RELEASED IT HERE FIRST! So stop the speculating!" the group wrote. "I don't think there's a clear link" between the celebrity hacks and hacking groups such as Anonymous and LulzSec, said Hypponen, "but obviously these groups are amoebas, and they change shape and they're so different from each other." Their motives are also unclear.

Well, at least until the pretty actresses stop taking nude photos.