14 DAY TRIAL // UK resident Richard Neale, co-founder and former IT director at Esselar, has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for hacking 900 mobile phones belonging to Aviva employees.
His story started in 2009, when together with two friends, Shane Taylor and Simon Rogan, founded Esselar, a company that provided IT services for mobile enterprise users.
After spending four years in the company, he had a fall-out with his partners, and eventually left Esselar, but not without harboring ill feelings towards it and his two previous partners.
Neale went on a personal hacking crusade against his former firm, one that started with him hacking its Twitter account and replacing the avatar with a bleeding heart.
As The Daily Mail is reporting, his vendetta then continued when "he created a false user login under Mr. Taylor's name and then rejected expenses claims which his former colleague had submitted."
Neale just couldn't let it go and things escalated the next year, in May 2014, on the night when Esselar staff was giving a demo of their security products for insurance company Aviva.
Neale hacked 900 Aviva employee phones
On that night, using his knowledge of Esselar systems and a Heartbleed-based hack, he accessed 900 phones belonging to Aviva employees, whipping their data.
Aviva support staff was able to recover the data in less than 24 hours, but this put authorities on Mr. Neale's trail, which eventually got him arrested and convicted after he admitted his actions.
Mr. Neale was probably pretty happy in the end, his revenge hacking campaign eventually leading to serious financial losses to his former company.
Soon after the incident, Aviva did terminate their contract with Esselar, which due in part to the scandal, was also forced to rebrand as Mobliciti.
The company lost the £80,000-per-year ($123,000 / €109,000) contract with Aviva, which also submitted a damages claim for £70,000 ($107,000 / €95,000).