14 DAY TRIAL // Glenn Mangham, also known as the hacker that managed to breach Facebook and gain access to “invaluable” intellectual property, was sentenced to 8 months in jail after the court didn’t completely buy his story about wanting to improve the media giant’s security.
According to The Guardian, 26-year-old Mangham hacked into Facebook last year from his parents’ house by first breaching the account of an employee who was vacationing at the time.
His lawyer tried to convince the court that his client was actually an “ethical hacker” who simply wanted to help the social media site improve its security measures. Similar to the situation described by Kevin Mitnick in his book Ghost in the wires, the self-proclaimed security consultant tried to prove that he did it for the sheer fun of it and not for a profit.
“It was to identify vulnerabilities in the system so I could compile a report that I could then bundle over to Facebook and show them what was wrong with their system,” Mangham said.
However, the prosecutors didn’t give in and claimed that the sophisticated methods he used combined with his ingenuity proved otherwise. They even went to the length of saying that this was “the most extensive and grave incident of social media hacking to be brought before the British courts.”
Fortunately for the hacker, Judge McCreath wasn’t influenced by initial reports issued by the US authorities who feared that Facebook may have been the target of corporate espionage. He acknowledged that Mangham didn’t have any criminal intent and that he never intended to have financial gain.
“But this was not just a bit of harmless experimentation. You accessed the very heart of the system of an international business of massive size, so this was not just fiddling about in the business records of some tiny business of no great importance,” the judge said.
Due to his persistent and sophisticated conduct, not to mention the fact that he risked the reputation of the innocent Facebook employee, the judge considered he couldn’t just let this one slide so he sentenced him to 8 months in jail and gave him a crime prevention order that restricted him from accessing the Internet.