14 DAY TRIAL // 21-year-old Nicholas Webber, sentenced to jail for five years in 2011 for running a cybercrime website called GhostMarket, managed to hack into the networks of the prison after being allowed to attend an IT class.
The incident occurred back in 2011, but it only came to light recently after the teacher, Michael Fox, who held the IT class at HMP Isis in South London, filed a lawsuit against Kensington and Chelsea College, the educational institution he worked for at the time.
According to the Daily Mail, the teacher was excluded by the prison on the basis that he allowed the hacker to breach the institution’s computer systems. He was also laid off by Kensington and Chelsea College.
Fox is displeased with the fact that even though the college cleared him of committing any security breaches, they haven’t done enough to help him find a new job.
Fox argued that it wasn’t his decision to allow Webber to attend the IT class. He believes the hacker shouldn’t have been allowed to attend considering that he was a convicted computer hacker.
While it appears the incident caused some panic at the time, the prison’s representatives explained that the computer system was a closed network at the time of the incident and that the hacker couldn’t have gained access to the Internet or any sensitive information.
GhostMarket, the site created by Webber when he was 17 years old, earned him a profit of £15 million ($22.5 million / 17 million EUR). The website offered its 8,000 members information on how to make fraudulent purchases on online stores with stolen credit cards and how to create malware.
The site was also a marketplace for stolen credit cards.