A British teenager has admitted trying to hack into the computers
of senior US government officials, including the director of the CIA and the
deputy director of the FBI.
Kane Gamble, 18, pleaded guilty on Friday to 10 charges at
Leicester crown court. Besides John Brennan, the then director of the CIA, and
Mark Giuliano, a former deputy director of the FBI, his targets included Avril
Haines, Barack Obama’s deputy national security adviser, and John Holdren, his
senior science and technology adviser.
Gamble, who is from Coalville in Leicestershire, pleaded guilty to
eight charges of “performing a function with intent to secure unauthorised
access” to the computers and two of “unauthorised modification of computer
material”.
According to the indictment, he committed a series of
hacking-related crimes between June 2015 and February 2016. Gamble’s first
target was Brennan, before he moved on to former US secretary of homeland
security Jeh Johnson, then Haines.
In October 2015, Gamble began targeting FBI special agent Amy Hess
and her boss at the bureau, Giuliano. The following month, he tried to hack
into an FBI portal. Early in 2016, he focused on a Comcast account owned by
former US director of national intelligence James Clapper and the computer of
another Obama official, Vonna Weir Heaton.
Also in January last year, he targeted a Comcast account operated
by Holdren and began an attempt to gain access to the US Department of
Justice’s network.
Gamble was released on conditional bail and will be sentenced at
the same court on 15 December. The prosecution case was not opened and no
details were given in court about the offences to which Gamble has admitted.
Culled from: The
Guardian
No comments:
Post a Comment