Facebook Hack: British Student Jailed for 8 Months

A 26-year old British student named Glenn Mangham was meted a sentence of 8 months imprisonment on Friday for hacking Facebook between April and May 2011. The security breach was described by Chief Crown Prosecutor Alison Saunders (Crown Prosecution Service, London) as the most extensive and flagrant incidence of social media hacking to be brought before British courts.

Mangham, a software development student from York, broke into the internal system of Facebook by using an account of a Facebook employee who was on vacation. Prosecutor Sandip Patel said that Mangham stole invaluable intellectual property from the world’s biggest social networking site. Patel told the Southwark Crown Court that Mangham acted with determination, undoubted ingenuity and it was sophisticated, it was calculating.

Defense lawyer Tony Ventham argued that his client was an ethical hacker who only wanted to show the vulnerabilities of Facebook to help improve its security.

Mangham told the court he hacked Facebook 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 claimed during the trial that he had pointed out the vulnerabilities of Yahoo in the past and was even rewarded for it.

But the prosecutors nor Judge Alistair McCreath did not buy this line of reasoning. Judge McCreath said Mangham’s claim that he wanted to help Facebook thru the hack was a retrospective justification, not the real motive for the breach.

Judge McCreath also acknowledged that Mangham never intended to pass any information he got from Facebook or make any financial gain from it. Nevertheless, he said that Mangham accessed the very heart of the system of an international business of massive size, so this was not just fiddling about in the business records of some tiny business of no great importance.

Facebook alerted the FBI when it discovered the breach in May. Mangham was caught in the Yorkshire residence of his parents in June 2 by the Metropolitan Police Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU) and was charged in August. He pleaded guilty on December 13.

According to the PCeU, Mangham stole internal intellectual material from the servers of Facebook. The Palo Alto-based company, which earlier thought that the breach was part of an industrial espionage, did not give details as to what Mangham actually hacked into. Facebook made it clear though, that no user data was compromised during the attack.

Facebook spent $200,000 for the investigation which finally nailed Mangham. In a statement to the press, Facebook said, we take any attempt to gain unauthorized access to our network very seriously.

Facebook has a corporate culture steeped in hacking, what with its hackathons held every six to eight weeks and founder Mark Zuckerberg himself saying, we have a big belief in moving fast, pushing boundaries, saying that it’s OK to break things. He also clearly stated at an event for future internet entrepreneurs, We’ve got this whole ethos that we want to build a hacker culture.

It should be remembered that when he was still a student and during the formative years of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg hacked Harvard’s computer network. Harvard charged Zuckerberg with breach of security, violations of copyrights and individual privacy, and also threatened him with expulsion. All the charges were dropped by Harvard in the end.

But with the breach done by Mangham, Facebook showed that like other companies, it does not like someone unauthorized peeping on its system. Even if it tolerates hacking within the boundaries of its organization, it does not want hackers from the outside, noble intention or not. As Mangham painfully found out, Facebook is not as forgiving as Harvard.