Pirate Bay founder convicted of hacking

Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, one of the founders of torrent site The Pirate Bay, has been convicted in Denmark for hacking a database of an IT company and a number of government databases. A co-defendant was also found guilty.

It is not yet clear how long Svartholm Warg will be behind bars; he has been found guilty, but the sentence has yet to be determined, writes the Copenhagen Post. The Swede can be jailed for up to six years; the public prosecutor hopes that the judge will give him at least five years in prison and deport him from Denmark. It is unclear what prison sentence the co-defendant of Svartholm Warg is facing.

The Pirate Bay founder was convicted of cracking a database of ICT company CSC. He is also alleged to have broken into a database containing information about driver’s licenses and a database containing information about wanted persons in the Schengen area, and he allegedly gained access to police officers’ email accounts.

Svartholm Warg was arrested in Cambodia in 2012 at the request of Swedish authorities, who were looking for him for hacking. In September he was sentenced to one year in prison in Sweden. In November, his home country extradited him to Denmark, which also wants to prosecute him for hacking. In the Swedish case, the judge ruled that it could not be proven that he had been guilty of a hacking of a financial institution, because his computer could have been operated by someone else. It is remarkable that the same computer would have been used in the Danish case.