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UK Teen Who Hacked CIA Director Sentenced To 2 Years In Prison (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: A British teenager who gained notoriety for hacking a number of high profile United States government employees including former CIA director John Brennan and former director of intelligence James Clapper was sentenced Friday to two years in prison. Eighteen-year-old Kane Gamble pleaded guilty to 10 separate charges, including eight counts of "performing a function with intent to secure unauthorized access" and two counts of "unauthorized modification of computer material," the Guardian reported.
Gamble, otherwise known by his online alias Cracka, was 15 at the time that he started his hacking campaigns. The alleged leader of a hacking group known as Crackas With Attitude (CWA), Gamble made it a point to target members of the U.S. government. The young hacker's group managed to successfully gain access to ex-CIA director John Brennan's AOL email account. The group hacked a number of accounts belonging to former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, including his personal email, his wife's email, and his phone and internet provider account. The hackers allegedly made it so every call to Clapper's home phone would get forwarded to the Free Palestine Movement.
Gamble, otherwise known by his online alias Cracka, was 15 at the time that he started his hacking campaigns. The alleged leader of a hacking group known as Crackas With Attitude (CWA), Gamble made it a point to target members of the U.S. government. The young hacker's group managed to successfully gain access to ex-CIA director John Brennan's AOL email account. The group hacked a number of accounts belonging to former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, including his personal email, his wife's email, and his phone and internet provider account. The hackers allegedly made it so every call to Clapper's home phone would get forwarded to the Free Palestine Movement.
"performing a function with intent to secure unauthorized access"
James Clapper... the chap who oversaw the largest "intent to secure unauthorized access" campaign in the history of computing? The one which targeted people all around the world for "full take" access? THAT James Clapper?
When Clapper does 3 billion counts of whatever punishment this idiot kid will get, and goes away for the rest of his life, and the other people involved do similar time, then maybe we can think about what's appropriate for the idiot kid.
Until then it's simply more "rules for me but not for thee".
This is nothing less than a miscarriage of justice.
of course the government with Israel's influence wants to nail him for that.
Either way, I was with him until he decided to modify information. Release info is one thing. Modifying it is another.
The head of the CIA using an AOL account isn't as bad as it seems.
Brennan had an account with AOL from the beginning of the internet, and only used it for personal, trivial things. He had a strong password, and didn't reuse passwords. All his work-related communications were done elsewhere.
The "hack" was Gamble calling up AOL pretending to be Brennan, and having a sysadmin change the password.
Brennan did nothing wrong, and could not have prevented this. In fact, he even did things right by not having any business-related communications on that account.
I don't know the specifics of James Clappers' hack, but it was very likely the same. Assuming Clapper didn't have work-related stuff on his personal E-mail (and there's no reason to suspect that he did), this was nothing more than some high-level people being embarrassed by a kid hacker.