Abney Associates
Nicholas Webber, 21, was jailed for five years for running a
criminal website He started his criminal career at £24,000-a-year Bradfield
College Prison IT Teacher Michael Fox was made redundant after the incident Fox
protests he had no idea Webber was a hacker One of Britain’s most notorious
cyber criminals hacked into a prison computer system from inside jail – after he
was allowed to join an IT class.
Nicholas Webber, 21, jailed for five years in 2011 for
masterminding a multi-million-pound internet crime site, triggered the security
scare during a lesson. It is understood his actions caused ‘major panic’ but it
is not clear what, if anything, he managed to access. The prison, HMP Isis in
South London, blamed his teacher, Michael Fox, who was employed by Kensington
and Chelsea College. He was banned from
the prison but the college cleared him of committing any security breaches at a
disciplinary hearing last March. However, he was made redundant when no
alternative work could be found for him. More... Pictured with piles of cash:
The public schoolboy jailed for five years for masterminding £18m internet scam
Computer hacker, 21, jailed for masterminding £27 MILLION fraud in his bedroom
taking credit card details from unsuspecting
internet users On Friday, Mr Fox, from Bromley, Kent, began a claim for
unfair dismissal, arguing that it wasn’t his decision to put Webber, the son of
a former member of Guernsey’s parliament, in his class. He says he had no idea
he was a hacker.
At a hearing at Croydon Employment Tribunal, Mr Fox accused
the college of not doing enough to find
him another job. ‘The perceived problem was there was a tutor who had been
excluded by the prison and charged with allowing a hacking expert to hack into
the prison’s mainframe,’ he said. In a statement, the college’s business
development director, Shanie Jamieson, said: ‘He [Mr Fox] did not feel he had
done anything wrong as the student concerned was in his view a convicted
computer hacker and should not have been allowed in his classroom.’Mr Fox’s
tribunal hearing was adjourned until April.
A Prison Service spokesman confirmed Webber was involved in
the incident but declined to answer questions about it. He said: ‘At the time
of this incident in 2011 the educational computer system at HMP Isis was a
closed network. No access to personal information or wider access to the
internet or other prison systems would have been possible.’The incident
happened a year after the opening of the £110 million prison, which houses 18
to 24-year-olds. It has been beset by a series
of technological problems caused by breakdowns in its cutting-edge biometric
roll-call system where inmates have to leave an electronic thumbprint whenever
they move from one part of the jail to another. Webber was only 17 when he
created an internet forum for computer hackers with the potential to fleece up
to £15 million from individuals and firms.
He was arrested for using fraudulent credit card details to
pay for a penthouse suite at the Hilton Hotel in Park Lane, Central London. A
court was told he set up GhostMarket after leaving £24,000-a-year Bradfield
College, Berkshire, where he got into trouble for deleting friends’ detention
records from the school computer. GhostMarket – dubbed a global ‘crimebook’
with 8,000 members worldwide – gave tips on how to create computer viruses, harvest
credit card data and use it to pay for goods on eBay, as well as offering to
sell details of 100,000 stolen credit cards. Police have documented £473,000
losses from 3,500 of the cards, but estimate they could have been used to steal
£15 million. Webber, of Southsea, Hampshire, who once boasted online that he
was ‘probably the most wanted cyber criminal just now’, also used stolen
details to buy computers, video games, iPhones and iPods worth £40,000, and to
pay for stays in luxury hotels.
Abney Associates
READ MORE:
