British Man Sentenced to 8 Months in Prison for Hacking into FaceBook
A 26 year British man admitted infiltrating the social media website from his parents’ house between April and May last year.
His actions were said to have risked destroying ”the whole enterprise” and sparked fears among American authorities of industrial espionage.
Glenn Mangham, a software development student from Cornlands Road, York, told the London court he had wanted to identify vulnerabilities in the system so he could alert Facebook.
He said he had previously shown the search engine Yahoo how it could improve its security.
Prosecutor Sandip Patel rejected his claims. He said: ”He acted with determination, undoubted ingenuity and it was sophisticated, it was calculating.”
FaceBook spent over $200,000 cleaning up after the crime which Mangham referred to as a “mini project”.
The prosecutor referred to the crime as: ”The most extensive and grave incident of social media hacking to be brought before the British courts.”
Judge Alistair McCreath in passing sentence, told Mangham his actions were not harmless and had ”real consequences and very serious potential consequences,” which could have been ”utterly disastrous” for Facebook. ”You and others who are tempted to act as you did really must understand how serious this is,” he said. ”The creation of that risk, the extent of that risk and the cost of putting it right mean at the end of it all I’m afraid a prison sentence is inevitable.”
