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HACKER

Indictment made public in historic hacker case

The Swedish co-founder of Pirate Bay has been in Danish custody since November. His court appearances have been behind closed doors, but thanks to a freedom of information request, the charges against are finally made known.

Indictment made public in historic hacker case
Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg will face trial in September. Photo: Simon Klose/WikiCommons
Swedish hacker Gottfrid Svartholm Warg has sat in a Danish prison since November. His court appearances have taken place behind closed doors and his mother and a legion of online supporters have argued that he has been treated unfairly while in custody. 
 
The co-founder of the online file-sharing service Pirate Bay, Warg and an unnamed 20-year-old Danish defendant are accused of stealing social security numbers from Denmark’s driving licence database, illegally accessing information in a Schengen Region database and hacking into police email accounts. 
 
Although the hacking case represents the largest of its kind in Danish history, the closed-door thus far has meant that details have been hard to come by. 
 
But now, the Ritzau news agency has gained access to the prosecution’s indictment through a freedom of information act. 
 
According to the indictment, Warg and his Danish accomplice had four months of access to the IT firm CSC’s database, and used that time to gather has much information from official public registries as possible. 
 
The two men are being officially charged with disrupting information systems, obtaining trade secrets and causing malicious damage. 
 
All three charges can be punishable by up to six years in prison, but the senior prosecutor in the case has said she will pursue a four-year sentence for both defendants. 
 
Warg was extradited from Sweden, where he was serving a one-year sentence for hacking into a public database there, in November. Since his time in Danish custody, his supporters have criticised his treatment, which included keeping him isolated and without access to reading material. Speaking to The Local in December, his mother Kristina Svartholm Warg likened his imprisonment to "torture".
 
"He's in isolation and he's only allowed to interact with prisoners for two hours a week. He is being treated as if he is dangerous. You can't do this to a person – it's torture," she said. "He should be treated decently until he is in court, and this is not decent."
 
Following Kristina Svartholm's complaints, her son was allowed reading material and more interaction with other inmates.

 
Warg and his codefendant will finally face trial in Frederiksberg Court on September 2nd, nearly ten months after he was extradited from Sweden. 

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HACKING

Suspected hackers show porn on Swedish station billboard

Commuters in a southeast Swedish city were briefly roused from their wintry routines by a public display of pornography at a bus stop outside the central rail station, officials said on Friday.

Suspected hackers show porn on Swedish station billboard
The screens at Kalmar station began suddenly showing porn images. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
For about 15 minutes on Thursday afternoon, during maintenance of an interactive display in the city of Kalmar, the usual adverts and videos were replaced by explicit images from a pornography website.
   
“We got information from a bus driver that someone had put pornographic imagery on one of our displays,” Karl-Johan Bodell, traffic director at Kalmar's regional public transport company KLT, told AFP.
   
The screen at Kalmar's central station in Sweden's southeast was quickly switched off — and will remain off until the cause is uncovered.
   
Local media reported that hackers were to blame and Bodell conceded that hacking was “the first thing that comes to mind”, but stressed that the cause had not yet been confirmed. 
   
KLT said the company supplying the display was conducting an investigation into what had caused the switch and how they might prevent future incidents.
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