14 DAY TRIAL // A Swedish 19-year-old boy was convicted on Monday for breaking into three university computers, The Associated Press reported today. Due to the Swedish laws, the name of the hacker could not be disclosed but he was found guilty for "breaching the systems of the universities in Linkoping, Umea and Uppsala in 2004." The boy is now forced to pay a fine of $25,000 in damages for the affected universities after he was previously acquitted by a lower court."Overturning an acquittal by a lower court, the Svea Court of Appeal gave the 19-year-old man a conditional sentence and ordered him to pay 160,000 kronor (US$25,000; ?17,000) in damages to the universities," AP informed today.
"He is also suspected of breaches at San Jose, California, based Cisco Systems. FBI agents came to Sweden last year to interrogate him in that case, he said, adding that he was innocent."
It's not pretty clear how he managed to break into the mentioned systems and if he really did it but there's another evident proof that our computers' security is often threatened by all kinds of attacks.
As we expected, the teenage sustains he is not guilty as he only built the utilities used in the attacks but he never attempted to break into the universities' systems. "They have destroyed my life before I'm even a grown-up," he told Computerworld.
The same source reports that the hacker was arrested after the police "raided his home in Uppsala, about an hour's drive north of Sweden, in 2004, seizing computers and other equipment."
In the recent few days, the hack attacks were pretty popular as even the security companies that are supposed to protect our systems were affected by more or less critical attempts. For example, the Avast antivirus forum was hacked by a group of attackers who tried to demonstrate that even a powerful security vendor can be tricked.