| directfiesta |
02-04-2004 03:59 PM |
Terror alert boy hacker escapes jail
This Kid is something else...lol
Quote:
Tuesday February 3, 2004
The Guardian
A schoolboy who hacked into the computer system at an American nuclear research lab triggering a security alert narrowly escaped jail yesterday.
Joseph McElroy, now 18, was ordered to do 200 hours community service by a judge at Southwark crown court in London, after admitting at an earlier hearing unauthorised modification of the contents of a computer in June 2002.
McElroy, from Woodford Green in east London, now a student at Exeter University, claimed he had just been using the immense power of the computer system at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, near Chicago, to upload and store film and music files from the internet.
The court heard he had developed a software programme called "Deathserv x" which cracked the facility's electronic security shield. Staff at the lab, one of the world's main centres for high energy physics research, feared a terrorist attack on the United States and pushed the "panic button", closing the network for three days.
McElroy was arrested in July 2003 by Scotland Yard's computer crimes unit, alerted by US authorities. Judge Andrew Goymer said he was very lucky he was not going to prison.
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