Facebook Hacker Gets 8 Months in Jail

A 26-year-old Briton was sentenced to eight months for hacking Facebook in 2011.

A 26-year-old Briton was sentenced to eight months for hacking Facebook in 2011.

Glenn Mangham was sentenced to jail Feb. 17 by a British Court. According to the Daily Mail, Mangham impersonated a Facebook employee and hacked into three of the company’s servers. He was then able to obtain restricted internal data, which he downloaded onto an external hard drive between April and May of last year.

The breach was discovered by Facebook in May. The company alerted the FBI, and Scotland Yard’s e-crimes unit raided Mangham’s home June 2, 2011, after an investigation. The sentence was the result of a guilty plea to three counts of securing unauthorized access to computer material with intent and one of unauthorized access to computer material.

Mangham, a software development student from York, claimed that he had previously shown Yahoo how it could improve its security and said he wanted to do the same for Facebook, according to reports.

“It was to identify vulnerabilities in the system so I could compile a report that I could then bundle over to Facebook and show them what was wrong with their system,” he told the court.

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