A British teenager has been sentenced to six months in jail after pleading guilty to illegally accessing the Gmail account of a former top aide to former Prime Minister Tony Blair. Junaid Hussain was allegedly a member of the TeamPoison hacking crew and had posted some of Blair’s personal information online after the attack.
The attack that Hussain admitted to being involved with was a breach of the email account of one of Blair’s former advisers. Hussain, who used the handle “TriCk”, pleaded guilty in early July to the attack and was sentenced Tuesday in England to six months in prison for the attack. He was arrested in April.
The compromise of personal data belonging to Blair and some of his relatives and contacts was just one of the attacks that prosecutors allege TeamPoison and Hussain were involved in. In January there was an attack on some systems belonging to T-Mobile, which authorities allege was carried out by TeamPoison, as well as another attack on the United Nations Development Programme.
It’s relatively rare for someone to be sentenced to any jail time in relation to the kind of attack that Hussain admitted to carrying out against Blair’s former assistant. But the high-profile status of the victim and the contacts whose information was compromised may have been an influencing factor in this case.
Hussain’s attorney, Ben Cooper, said that his client understood the consequences of his actions now.
“When one meets him, he is a very shy, unassuming young man,” Cooper said, according to The Telegraph. “He does now understand the very great seriousness of what he has done.”
