Criminal complaint filed with UK police

Sep 10, 2009 12:04 GMT  ·  By

The publisher of avsim.com, a major flight simulation website which was almost completely wiped out by a hacker back in May, announced that the person responsible had been identified. The evidence has been turned over to UK's Metro Police and a criminal complaint has been filed.

AVSIM is an online community of flight simulation enthusiasts, which dates back to 1996. Amongst other things, the place was being used to host and share custom-built aircraft models, scenery, sounds, missions and utilities, primarily for the Microsoft Flight Simulation application.

On May 12, 2009, a hacker obtained unauthorized access to the servers used for hosting the AVSIM website and associated services and proceeded to deleting all data on the hard drives. Unfortunately, the owners' disaster recovery plan did not involve offline backups, making the damage almost irreparable.

"We will not name any names, but have incontrovertible evidence of the individual that performed the hack of AVSIM on May 12th this year," recently announced Tom Allensworth, the site's founder. The hacker has been tracked down to UK and, according to Mr. Allensworth, a criminal complaint has been filed with the Police Constabulary of London.

The website has been slowly recovering since then, but the re-building process, which is still ongoing, has cost the owners $50,000 so far. Allensworth pointed out that $25,000 were from donations sent by the community, to whom he extended eternal gratitude. "We fully intend to pursue this in the civil court to recoup those expenses" he said.

Apparently, the AVSIM publisher initially tried to settle the incident out of court, but after failing to reach an agreement with the hacker, he decided to file a complaint. The perpetrator faces multiple charges, including unauthorized access to a computer system and data theft, as 60,000 email addresses were also stolen from the forum database.

"Considerable harm has been brought to AVSIM, not only to our reputation, but to our day to day operations, and at a minimum, we fully expect that the criminal complaint filed today will result in the perpetrator spending some time behind bars - under UK law," concluded  Tom Allensworth.