A man who confessed to hacking into Miley Cyrus' private email account has escaped a prison sentence.

Josh Holly, 21, admitted to gaining unauthorised access to the singer/actress' MySpace.com profile in late 2007 and then took to cyberspace to brag about obtaining semi-naked photos of Cyrus from her mailbox.

Police seized his computer from his home in Nashville, Tennessee and he was arrested last December and charged with possession of unauthorised credit card account numbers, a claim he denied.

Holly was convicted of the crime and faced up to 13 years behind bars but he was instead ordered to serve three years' probation when he appeared in federal court in Nashville on Tuesday.

He was not charged in connection to Cyrus' case, although it was the former Hannah Montana star who first alerted authorities to his illegal activities.