A cofounder of the Swedish file-sharing Web site The Pirate Bay was sentenced on Friday to three-and-a-half years in prison, in what the prosecutor called Denmark’s biggest-ever hacking case.
Gottfrid Warg, 30, also known as “Anakata,” was found guilty of illegally accessing the computer systems of information technology provider CSC in Denmark, the Danish Civil Registration System and local police criminal registries in 2012.
When sentencing, the Court of Frederiksberg in Copenhagen said the attacks were systematic, intensive and took place over a long period of time.
It said in a press release on Friday that significant amounts of highly sensitive personal information had been downloaded in the campaign.
Warg’s accomplice, a 21-year-old Dane who successfully applied for his name not to be made public, was sentenced to six months in prison for complicity in a hacking attempt made by Warg in February 2012, but walked free from the court as he had already served 17 months in pretrial detention.
The Pirate Bay, launched in 2003, originally provided links to music and movie files stored on other users’ computers. Swedish subsidiaries of prominent music and film companies had taken the company to court, claiming damages for lost revenue.
Warg has been in pretrial detention in Denmark since November last year, when he was extradited from Sweden after serving a jail sentence there.
In Sweden, Warg had been convicted of copyright theft due to his involvement in The Private Bay, and separately for illegally accessing the computer systems of consulting firm Logica, which did work for the Swedish government and a bank.
Warg was arrested in Cambodia in 2012 and was extradited to Sweden to face the charges there.
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