OM demands two years in prison for hospital hacker

The Public Prosecution Service has demanded a two-year prison sentence against a 28-year-old hacker who allegedly broke into systems of the Groene Hart Hospital in Gouda. He would have taken patient records from the servers.

The demand is a two-year prison sentence, of which eight months are suspended with three years’ probation. In addition, the Public Prosecution Service considers psychological treatment necessary. It is still unknown what punishment the hacker will receive: the court in The Hague will pronounce the verdict on December 17.

The hack became known in 2012. It concerned a server that exchanged data via unencrypted FTP connections and which the hospital had protected with a weak password. In addition to medical records, the suspect is said to have obtained information from more than 493,000 people, including social security numbers and name and address details.

The suspect defended himself by advocating that he is an ethical hacker. However, the prosecutors of the national prosecutor’s office find that there was no ethical hack when cracking the systems of the Groene Hart Hospital. The 28-year-old man, cited in the original message as ‘Bonnie of the hacking housewives’, is suspected not only of abusing the vulnerability he discovered, but also of downloading patient records and placing malware. In addition, the police found a large amount of child pornography on the suspect’s computers.

According to the Public Prosecution Service, ‘the limits that could apply to ethical hacking have been seriously exceeded’. “By constantly accessing the hospital’s data, downloading, discussing and sometimes even sharing this data with third parties and by leaving behind malicious software, this hack was no longer related to ideological motives in any way.” the prosecution said in a statement.