Jail for ‘ethical’ hacker who bypassed Facebook security from his bedroom

Graham cluley
Graham Cluley
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A British student who breached security at Facebook last year has been sentenced to eight months in jail, despite arguing that his intentions were not malicious.

Glenn Mangham, who had previously been rewarded by Yahoo for finding vulnerabilities in its systems, unlawfully accessed and hacked into Facebook’s computer systems between April and May last year from his bedroom in York.

Specifically, Mangham breached a webserver used by Facebook to set puzzles to software engineers who might be interested in working for the social network.

Mangham then gained access to the account of Facebook employee Stefan Parker, and used the staff member’s privileges to access Facebook’s Mailman server (used to run internal and external email lists), and the Facebook Phabricator server used by internal developers.

Prosecutors claimed that Facebook spent US $200,000 (£126,400) dealing…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity 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 analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, or drop him an email.

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