Briton pleads guilty to US nuclear lab hacking attack
A teenage computer student has pleaded guilty to hacking into IT systems at an American nuclear weapons laboratory.
Joseph James McElroy, 18, a first-year undergraduate at Exeter University, admitted hacking into 17 computer systems at the Fermi National Accelerator laboratory at a hearing at Bow Street Magistrates court in London on Friday.
The court heard that the teenager hacked into Fermilab computers on 25 June 2002 and used them to store hundreds of gigabytes of copyrighted film and music files.
McElroy later told police that he had devised a hacking tool with a group of friends and fellow hackers, and had password protected the files so that they could be shared among the group.
Technicians at the laboratory, which is responsible for ensuring the safety and integrity of US nuclear weapons, discovered the problem after noticing that scheduled back-ups were taking longer than normal.
The laboratory, near Chicago, was forced to close the affected computer systems down for three days and spend £20,000 in repair costs. Although research data was left inaccessible while the repairs were carried out, no data was lost, the court heard.
The teenager was arrested at his parents home in London following a joint investigation by the Department of Energy and Scotland Yard’s Computer Crime Unit.
