18-year-old Briton gets two years in prison for hacking ex-CIA chief’s accounts

An 18-year-old Briton has been sentenced to two years in prison, including for breaking into accounts of former CIA head John Brennan. The boy was the founder of a group called Crackas With Attitude.

According to the BBC, the teenager will spend two years in a juvenile detention center. He had confessed in October that he had broken into accounts of Brennan and former NSA director James Clapper. At the time, he pleaded guilty to a total of ten offences, such as ‘performing an act with the intent to gain unauthorized access’ and ‘unauthorized modification of computer equipment’. According to the defendant’s defense, he acted naively and childishly, and never intended to harm people.

According to the judge, he was carrying out a “campaign of cyber terrorism”. The Guardian reports that FBI Deputy Director Mark Giuliano was among those targeted and that he had accessed the phone and email accounts of various officials between June 2015 and February 2016. As a result, he came into possession of sensitive data, parts of which he sent to WikiLeaks. The Briton was arrested in the United Kingdom in 2016.

In the past, it was reported that Crackas With Attitude used to call call centers and pretend to be other people in order to obtain sensitive information, which in turn gave access to other accounts. Another member of the group was sentenced to two years in prison in the US last year. He had published names and contact information of tens of thousands of employees of the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security.