Hacker goes to jail for hacking into Facebook
A 26yr old British student, Glenn Mangham was jailed for eight months on Friday for infiltrating Facebook. The prosecutors described the hack as the most serious case of its kind they had seen.
Alison Saunders, London’s Chief Prosecutor said:
“This was the most extensive and flagrant incidence of social media hacking to be brought before British courts,”
He also added:
“Fortunately, this did not involve any personal user data being compromised.”
The hacker is a software development student who has admitted infiltrating Facebook from his bedroom at his parents’ house in York in northern England last year, sparking fears at the U.S. company that it was dealing with major industrial espionage, so says a report by reuters. Facebook has paid out $200,000 in investigating the breach.
Scotland Yard said in a statement that the breach had occurred “over a short period of time’’ in April of last year. The court was told that Mangham had obtained the information after hacking into the account of a Facebook employee while the staff member was on vacation.
Mangham explained his actions by telling that he had helped search engine Yahoo Inc improve its security and wanted to do the same for Facebook. However the Prosecutor denied his explanation. Judge Alistair McCreath told Mangham his actions were not harmless and had “real consequences and very serious potential consequences” which could have been “utterly disastrous” for Facebook.
Source: reuters
Abhijit Bangera
