Front room hacker gets 18 months

A COMPUTER hacker who accessed highly personal data and photographs in a sophisticated email scam from his mother's front room was jailed for 18 months yesterday.

Matthew Anderson, 33, was a key member of an international gang who abused his skills as a computer security expert to target businesses and individuals with spam containing hidden viruses.

He controlled victims' webcam devices remotely to see inside their homes, at one point boasting to a friend that he made a teenage girl cry by doing so.

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Files he saved on his own computer included webcam images of a girl in school uniform, a family photograph of a mother and her newborn baby in hospital and intimate pictures of a sexual nature.

Anderson, who admitted an offence under the Computer Misuse Act, appeared at Southwark Crown Court in central London.

Sentencing, Judge Geoffrey Rivlin said Anderson's offending was on an "almost unimaginable scale".

He said: "Your motivation throughout, apart from the relatively small sums of money that you obtained by way of payment from the business leads, was the pleasure and satisfaction that you derived from achieving such a massive invasion into the personal lives of so many others and also the sense of power that invasion gave you.

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"While you may not have been engaged in fraud, it is fair to say that in an age in which computers play such an important part in the lives of so many people and businesses, an offence of this nature inevitably raises great concern and consternation."

He added: "Conduct of this kind must be deterred. Plainly only a custodial sentence is justified for an offence of this nature."

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