UK Student Gets 8 Months in Prison for Hacking Facebook

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from maximumpc.com ..............A UK court handed down an 8 month sentence this week to a British student convicted of infiltrating Facebook’s internal network. 26 year-old Glenn Mangham hacked into Facebook’s servers from his home in York, England last Spring. Facebook, believing it was the victim of industrial espionage, called in the feds. It didn’t take long to track down Mangham.

Prosecutors have called this attack both “extensive and flagrant.” Facebook told the court that it had to spend $200,000 dealing with the matter. Though, that seems to be what Mangham wanted. It was his claim that he was only attempting to show Facebook that its system was insecure, as he had done in the past with Yahoo. The court was having none of it, ruling that his actions were malicious in nature.

No data was taken in the attacks, and Facebook has since sealed the hole that Mangham exploited. What’s your take on this? Was Mangham a helpful hacker, or a cyber-thug out for himself?