‘Anonymous’ member admits hacking UK abortion site
(AFP) – 2 days ago
LONDON — A member of the international computer hacking group Anonymous pleaded guilty in court in Britain on Saturday to breaking into and defacing the website of an abortion service.
James Jeffery, 27, said he targeted the site because he disagreed with his sister’s decision to terminate her pregnancy, Westminster Magistrates Court in central London heard.
He stole around 10,000 records with the details of women who had registered with the site, and replaced the logo of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service with the Anonymous symbol.
Jeffrey then boasted about the attack on Twitter, using the alias “Pablo Escobar” after the Colombian drug lord who died in 1993 and printing the name and log-on details of a BPAS administrator.
Police arrested him on Friday at his home in Wednesbury, central England, after the abortion service raised the alarm.
Jeffrey admitted one charge of gaining unauthorised access to data and another of gaining unauthorised access to a computer with the intention of impairing its operation.
Judge Daphne Wickham described him as a “zealot with an anti-abortion campaign”.
She refused to grant him bail, saying that he was an “able hacker” who could target other organisations and ordering that he should be held in custody until sentencing at a later date.
On Tuesday two Britons with alleged ties to Anonymous were among five people charged in the United States in in high-profile cyberattacks after a leader of the group became an FBI informant.
Ryan Ackroyd, 23, of Doncaster, and Jake Davis, 29, of Lerwick, Shetland Islands, were both arrested last year in Britain.
The UK Daily Mail is reporting that A member of hacking group Anonymous who broke into the website of Britain’s biggest abortion provider may also have launched cyber attacks on the CIA, FBI and Houses of Parliament, a court heard yesterday.
James Jeffery, 27, targeted the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) because he ‘disagreed’ with the decisions of two women he knew to terminate their pregnancies.
The ‘zealot’ went on to steal 10,000 database records containing the personal details of vulnerable women, which he intended to publish, the court was told.
Anonymous is a group of loosely connected hackers from around the world, thought to be behind several recent security breaches, including the disabling of the CIA website in the United States and the theft of information from Japanese electronics giant Sony.
Described as an ‘able’ hacker, who boasted of his feat on Twitter, Jeffery also identified ‘vulnerabilities’ on a string of websites belonging to major international organisations.
Police are investigating alleged hacking involving websites for the FBI, CIA, West Midlands police, the Houses of Parliament, the US Navy, Arizona police and Spanish police, Westminster Magistrates’ Court was told.
An FBI spokesman said: ‘There have been attempts to hack into our website, which are under investigation.’
The defendant, who admitted two offences under the Computer Misuse Act, showed no emotion as prosecutors outlined the case against him.
The court heard how he set upon the BPAS website after two women, to whom he was close, had abortions.
The firm believes its computer servers were targeted 26,000 times over a six-hour period.
Jeffery also managed to deface its website with the Anonymous logo and a message that made his anti-abortion sentiment ‘quite clear’.
He was arrested after officers traced the BPAS breach to his address.
Judge Daphne Wickham refused an application for bail, saying: ‘You clearly are an able hacker. You will be remanded in custody.’
Jeffery, of Wednesbury, West Midlands, will be sentenced at Southwark Crown Court at a later date.
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