14 DAY TRIAL // Matthew Keys, 29, of Sacramento, received a two-year prison sentence for providing technical help to Anonymous members who hacked the LA Times news site and defaced some of its headlines for around 30 minutes, back in 2010.
After being convicted last October and facing up to 25 years in prison, a Sacramento judge sentenced him to two years in prison and ordered him to surrender to police on June 15 so he would begin his prison sentence.
Keys' case has its roots in a 2010 incident, when the reporter was working for the KTXL Fox 40 TV station in Sacramento. After resigning his job, a vengeful Keys got in contact with LulzSec, one of Anonymous' biggest groups.
Keys provided hackers with KTXL backend credentials
The reporter offered hackers user credentials to KTXL's backend with the mention "i did not give you those passwords for 'research.' i want you to [expletive][expletive] up."
Because KTXL's CMS was running on a shared multi-site platform that also granted access to other news sites, using Keys' older passwords, the hackers got access to those sites as well, among which the biggest was the latimes.com news site.
Keys' wrongdoings were later discovered, and he was indicted in March 2013. A month later, he was also fired from Reuters, the news agency where he found a job. Reuters claims to have fired Keys because inaccurate reporting about the Boston Marathon bombings.
Keys also spammed KTXL's subscribers
During his trial, the prosecution accused Keys of taking the emails of various KTXL subscribers and sending spam, trying to sow Discord between them and the TV station. The prosecution was never able to prove this. A jury found Keys guilty last year and he received his prison sentence yesterday.
The judge also ordered Keys that, a week before presenting himself to police for his prison sentence, he should show up for another court hearing that will decide the financial damages to which the LA Times is entitled following the 2010 hacking incident.
UPDATE: The article was updated to show that the prosecution only accused Keys of sending spam to KTXL subscribers, but never proved it. The previous version of the story also claimed that he was arrested. As Mr. Keys told Softpedia, he was only summoned, never arrested.