MOSCOW, October 30 (RIA Novosti) — A court in Denmark has found Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and a Danish co-defendant guilty of hacking into the mainframe computer of IT service provider CSC, in the largest hacking case in the country’s history.
According to Danish news website TheLocal, judge Kari Sorensen ruled the “systematic and organized character” of the attacks made it “unlikely that other people apart from Warg used his computer in connection with the hacking of CSC.”
Warg had argued that the computer from which the attacks were made was a lab computer and therefore also accessed by other developers testing their programs. However, the judge dismissed this claim, and another theory that the computer could have been remote controlled, saying that Warg’s refusal to reveal details about who might have controlled the computer, or how, counted against his theory.
According to a report on PCWorld.com, the judge ruled that Warg “accessed hundreds of thousands of Danish social security numbers, criminal records and extradition agreements on CSC’s mainframe, which contained sensitive and confidential information belonging to private and public institutions.” She will sentence the Swede on Friday. Warg’s 21-year-old co-defendant was released immediately after the hearing, having already served 17 months prior to the trial.
Prosecutor Maria Cingari called for the maximum six year jail term, citing the unprecedented scale of the hacking. However, defence lawyer Louise Hoj argued for a one year sentence on the grounds that that “This case is not the worst case one can imagine,” and added that the hacking had not been carried out for financial gain, nor had information been sold or deleted.
The hacker was extradited in November last year from Sweden to Denmark to face the current charges, having been sentenced in Sweden to two years in jail in June 2013 for hacking computers at Logica, an IT firm which manages data for the Swedish government, and for making illegal online money transfers.
In September he was acquitted in the Swedish Appeal Court on another count of hacking, that of the Scandinavian bank Nordea. The court in that case ruled that the possibility of remote control could not be ruled out.
