A Northamptonshire student who’s hacking activities reportedly cost PayPal £3.5 million was sentenced to eighteen months in prison for his part in the crime.
He was also responsible for conspiring to attack the websites of Visa, MasterCard and others as well as PayPal. Following the attack over 100 PayPal employees were tasked to work on issues related to the attack. PayPal also had to deploy new hardware and software to ensure that a similar attack would never be successful again.
What probably hurt more than the prison sentence is that the judge ordered the defendant’s computer be seized and confiscated. He did ask if just the hard drive be taken and the shell of the computer be left, but the judge said that was too much like hard work. One would imagine that he had a pretty beefy machine which he was pretty fond of – £3.5 million costs to PayPal, couple of thousand quid on a computer, Hard to have too much sympathy.
8 Responses
I wonder how much of that money was for the new hardware and software and how much was really caused by the hacking. You really can’t claim the former because they should have had that in the first place. It would be like suing a burglar because you needed to install a security system after he broke in.
Has Paypal got more issues today? (Mon 28th) We cannot see our transactions on the site and the Tel number does not work. Customers have started to say they are having problems and the eBay chat program is not available..Or is it just me
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Multiple payments from a few buyers & not showing as paid on ebay.
Seems OK now?.
NO payment information received on our own website, just blank.
Having to check Paypal manually.