14 DAY TRIAL // Christopher Gardner, a British citizen living in New York, was arrested last week by US authorities and charged with hacking into the systems of weekly newspaper company Dan’s Papers, his former employer.
According to court documents, on December 17, 2012, the IT Director at Dan’s Papers contacted the FBI and notified the agency that an unknown individual had accessed the FTP server of Danshamptons.com, a website operated by Dan’s Papers.
The IT director said the robots.txt file hosted on the server was altered to make sure that the website would not show up in the results of search engines such as Google and Yahoo!.
As a result of the breach, the company’s website was not listed on search engines for several days.
After analyzing the IP address used to upload the new robots.txt file, investigators found that it belonged to Internet service provider Optimum Online.
The subscriber information provided by Optimum to investigators revealed that the IP address in question belonged to the suspect. The FBI has also managed to link Gardner’s email address to the IP from which the FTP server was accessed with the aid of information provided by Google and Verizon.
Gardner worked as a web administrator/web designer for danshamptons.com between April 4, 2011 and June 19, 2012.
Shortly after his termination, Gardner contacted Dan’s Papers’ IT Director and offered to redesign the websites. However, his offer was declined.
It appears that the credentials used to access the danshamptons.com FTP server were not changed after Gardner left the company, making it easy for him to alter the robots.txt file.
If he’s found guilty of these crimes, the suspect faces up to 10 years in prison.