A 24 year-old man from England has pleaded guilty to charges of hacking into both Microsoft and Nintendo’s servers, causing an estimated $US3 ($4)-4 million damages.
As The Verge report, Zammis Clark—a former security researcher at Malwarebytes—went before a court in London this week accused of accessing servers at both companies, stealing user information, accessing files related to unreleased products and illegally sharing login details.
He was arrested in June 2017 for his actions against Microsoft, which included hacking into servers that contained “confidential copies of pre-release versions of Windows”.
Yet after this arrest his online access went unrestricted, and in early 2018 Clark used a VPN to get access to Nintendo’s servers, including those used for “highly confidential game development”, and which held “development code for unreleased games”.
Despite his repeat offences, and the severity of them, Clark won’t be facing prison, at least in the near term. Because he is both autistic and has “face blindness”, the judge deemed that prison would pose a risk to Clark’s safety, and taken in light of his parent’s work in attempting to care and rehabilitate him, decided to issue a suspended 15-month sentence.
You can read the full story at The Verge.
Comments
2 responses to “Man Pleads Guilty To Hacking Both Microsoft And Nintendo”
So why didn’t we hear about these secret games??
TIL London considers autism and face blindness a get out of jail free card. Reading the article, this guy has repeatedly done intentionally malicious crimes, even after being caught several times before. Why is he getting such a lean sentence, AGAIN?
Because he is rain man. From the article it sounfs like he is a super high functioning autistic man who would basically have extreme difficulties functioning in the most basic of social circumstances let alone prison. Having face blindness indicates that he is a severe case and although he can crack codes like other people read books I strongly doubt he has any realisation that he is doing anything wrong, or probably would have difficulties understanding the full impact of his actions to others
That’s funny. If you listen to (read?) commentators on gaming sites they’d tell you only Sony gets hacked.