Hacker who bypassed Facebook security pleads guilty

A British student has pleaded guilty to charges that he breached security at Facebook earlier his year, despite arguing that his intentions were not malicious.

York computer science student Glenn Steven Mangham, 26, attempted to bypass security on the company’s internal systems, raising alarm amongst the FBI that industrial espionage was occurring, according to media reports.

Mangham, who had previously been rewarded by Yahoo for finding vulnerabilities in its systems, discovered that Facebook was far from amused by his activities.

The social networking giant discovered evidence that pointed back to Mangham and he was arrested by the Metropolitan Police Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU) in June.

Specifically, Mangham was accused of using a computer program to secure unauthorized access to Facebook, of attempting to hack into…

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.