Mckinnon, a 42-year-old unemployed computer worker, invaded the US military computer.
BEIJING, July 31 (Xinhua)-A British computer hacker is suspected of illegally invading the computer systems of the US Navy, Army and Air Force and the Ministry of National Defense in his London apartment, causing damage. The British authorities wanted to extradite him to the United States for trial. He appealed, but the London court ruled that he lost the case on the 30th. It is expected that he will be taken to the United States in a short time.
According to Sing Tao Global Network, McKinnon, a 42-year-old unemployed computer practitioner, was accused of successfully hacking into 97 computers of the US military and the Ministry of National Defense from 2001 to 2002. Some people described this as the largest hacking incident into the military computer system in history, which made the US authorities extremely embarrassed.
The chief prosecutor pointed out that the invasion paralyzed the military region responsible for protecting the capital Washington and the New Jersey Naval Ammunition Station. In addition to the military and the Ministry of National Defense, the computer systems of NASA and several private institutions were also invaded by him. The authorities estimate that the financial losses caused by these actions amount to 900,000 dollars.
Mckinnon will face eight counts of computer fraud in New Jersey and Virginia. If convicted, he will be sentenced to a maximum of 10 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.
Mckinnon, whose net name is "SOLO", defended himself in the British court, claiming that he was only trying to expose the loopholes in the computer security system of these departments and looking for evidence about UFOs.
Mckinnon wrote on the website of the British newspaper The Guardian last year: "I am an possessed man." He claimed that he spent a year sitting in front of the computer for an average of eight hours every day, invading the computer system of the US military, not washing and grooming every day, and binge drinking beer and smoking marijuana. He claimed that he had successfully found some photographic evidence to prove the existence of alien spaceships and the names and ranks of "non-human officers".
The prosecution accused him of deliberately using these actions to try to blackmail the US government. Mckinnon once left a message in a computer of the U.S. military, accusing the U.S. government of pursuing a foreign policy similar to government-sponsored terrorism.
He was arrested in 2002, and the defense lawyer asked for a trial in Britain, because if he was extradited to the United States, he might be taken to a military court for trial, or even be held at the US military base in Guantanamo, Cuba.
Editor: Lu Wei
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