A software development student from the UK has been sentenced to eight months in prison, after infiltrating the servers of Facebook between April and May last year. Facebook spent $US200,000 dealing with the crime, which sparked a huge investigation by the FBI and British authorities.
The 26-year-old student claims he had “wanted to identify vulnerabilities in the system so he could alert Facebook,” according to the UK Telegraph. The prosecutor, Sandip Patel, explained how Mangham had “unlawfully accessed and hacked into the social media website Facebook and its computers in April to May last year from his bedroom in Yorkshire”, ultimately stealing “invaluable” intellectual property, which he stored on an external hard drive.
Mangham hacked into the account of a Facebook employee while they were on holiday — clever — and from there managed to obtain restricted internal data. After routine security checks, Facebook identified the breach, and not long after the FBI were called in to help. In total, Facebook spent $US200,000 over the incident. Despite claiming to be an “ethical hacker”, Mangham has been sentenced to eight months in prison. [The Telegraph]
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