British boy, 15, hacked emails of CIA chief
A BRITISH teenager is facing jail after hacking into the phone and email accounts of senior US officials from his council house.
Kane Gamble compromised the then director of the CIA John Brennan as well as the former deputy director of the FBI, Mark Giuliano, by publishing sensitive information online.
Yesterday, a judge said ‘ all sentencing options will be open’ for the teenager, who was aged 15 and 16 when he committed the cyber crimes.
It is understood Gamble was the leader of five hackers calling themselves ‘ Crackers with Attitude’, who broke into email accounts in a search for evidence of aliens.
Also on the list of those he targeted was Barack Obama’s deputy national security adviser Avril Haines, his senior science and technology adviser John Holdren and FBI Special Agent Amy Hess.
A member of the group, believed to be Gamble, has told a news website that opening Brennan’s account was so easy that ‘a five- year- old’ could have done it.
Gamble, now 18, lives in a local authority home in Coalville, Leicestershire, with his mother Ann, 55, and some of his eight siblings.
He was arrested in February 2016, but has not been named publicly before now because of a court order which expired when he turned 18 this week.
He appeared at Leicester Crown Court yesterday, where he admitted ten charges relating to hacking between June 2015 and February 2016.
The teenager, who wore a black hooded jumper and T-shirt, was allowed to sit at the back of the court with his mother. His bar- rister, William Harbage, said Gamble was ‘on the autistic spectrum’.
The hacks were hugely embarrassing for the US at the time.
The group was able to access sensitive government documents stored as attachments in Brennan’s personal AOL account because the spy chief had for- warded them from his work email. They published a spreadsheet which included CIA employees’ alleged clearance levels, email addresses, phone numbers and social security numbers.
They also accessed a 47-page application for top-secret security clearance. Brennan said he was ‘outraged’ by the attack.
Speaking to the New York Post last year, one of the group of hackers described how they carried out the attack. He said after finding out Brennan was a customer with telecoms firm Verizon, they posed as an employee to trick a worker into revealing the spy chief’s personal information, including his account number, his PIN, Brennan’s AOL email address and the last four digits on his bank card.
They then contacted AOL pretending to be Brennan, saying he was locked out of his account.
Using the information from Verizon they were able to answer the security questions and reset the email account’s password.
Gamble whose father Jamie, 45, is a fork lift truck driver, admitted eight charges of ‘causing a computer to perform a function to secure unauthorised access to a program or data held in computers’ and two charges of ‘unauthorised modification of computer material’.
The Crown Prosecution Service said his actions caused ‘significant risk of serious damage to national security’.
Mr Justice Gilbert adjourned the hearing for the preparation of psychiatric and pre-sentence reports.
He released Gamble on conditional bail and said: ‘I’m saying nothing about the outcome.
‘All sentencing options will be open. It’s an anxious case which raises difficult issues.’
The court heard that while on bail, there had been no conditions limiting Gamble’s continued computer use. He will be sentenced in December.
The US did not seek extradition for Gamble as he was a youth at the time, it is understood.
This is in contrast to Lauri Love, a security researcher who lives with his parents near Newmarket, Suffolk, who is fighting extradition for allegedly hacking the US department of defence and other organisations.
Mr Love, 32, who has Asperger’s syndrome, could be sentenced to 99 years in jail if convicted of cyber attacks.
‘Serious damage to national security’