York CompSci student pleads guilty to Facebook hack
Social network wet pants in fear of industrial espionage
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A computer enthusiast from York has admitted hacking into Facebook.
Glenn Mangham, 26, pleaded guilty to hacking into the social networking site between April and May this year at a hearing in London's Southwark Crown Court on Tuesday. The court heard that the incident sparked a major security alert amid fears that some form of industrial espionage was involved, the BBC reports.
Mangham, a computer science student, had previously advised Yahoo! on how to improve the security of its website. Although his subsequent actions against Facebook were not maliciously motivated they were unauthorised and resulted in the extraction of what prosecutor Sandip Patel described as "highly sensitive intellectual property". Mangham had downloaded and stored code he wanted to work with offline.
Although Mangham attempted to delete his tracks he was tracked down and arrested, after which he freely admitted his actions, violations of the UK's Computer Misuse Act. Evidence of the hack was discovered during a routine security check.
In a statement, Facebook explained its decision to file a criminal complaint, adding that the "attack did not involve an attempt to compromise or access user data".
At Facebook nothing is more important to us than the security and integrity of our site, and we take any attempt to compromise our security network incredibly seriously. We work closely with law enforcement agencies and the police to ensure that offenders are brought to justice.This attack did not involve an attempt to compromise or access user data.
A sentencing hearing against Mangham has been set for 17 February. ®
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COMMENTS
Good
We cannot have people like this going around pointing out security flaws.
Security needs to be 100% black-boxed and hidden from view.
Only via total obscurity can we ever have safe systems otherwise people will be able to work out how to circumvent them. Anyone trying to shed light on security matters is clearly dangerous, quite possibly a terrorist and should be dealt with in the most sever terms possible.
Thus the only response from the courts should be to deport him to the USA (Facebook is, after all American) when he can be tried by a military court and executed.
The world will then be a safer place for us all.
'Allo 'allo, wotz been going on 'ere then?
So a “software development student” manages to crack facebork security put in place by a whole team of “security experts”
What was the "highly sensitive intellectual property"? Details of a flawed security application?? And to crown it all facebork only found the activity by accident!!!!
“At Facebork nothing is more important to us than the security and integrity of our site, and we take any attempt to compromise our security network incredibly seriously. We work closely with law enforcement agencies and the police to ensure that offenders are brought to justice”
It was lucky for facebork that Mangham was "of good character", I wonder what would be the outcome if somebody of dubious character did the same thing?
Methinks that facebork should report themselves to the plods for implementing poor security.
lolwut?
""attack did not involve an attempt to compromise or access user data"."
Well no, it wouldn't. You can get that just by sending a friend request.
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