A London court has sentenced a hacker to 9 months in prison for hacking into the National Lottery database.
Anwar Batson, 29, of Lancaster Road, Nothing Hill, London, was sentenced after he admitted committing four offences under the Computer Misuse Act 1990 and one fraud charge.
According to the UK National Crime Agency, Batson, in November 2016 broke into the database of the National Lottery and accessed about 9,000,000 customer records.
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Having accessed customer accounts, Batson is said to share the username and password with Idris Kayode Akinwunmi, 21, who stole £13 from the account and later sent £5 to Batson.
Batson is said to use a hacking tool called Sentry MBA to create a file that launched the attack. He didn't stop there. Using the online name 'Rosegold', he told others that they could make quick cash by using the hacking tool against Camelot which runs the lottery.
Akinwunmi was later arrested and jailed for 8 months, while another hacker named Daniel Thompson, aged 27, was jailed for 4 months for using Batson's app to bombard victim's web domain with thousands of attempts to log in to customer accounts.
Batson was later arrested in May 2017, and he denied being involved in the hack and insisted that he was, in fact, a victim of online trolling and that his devices were either cloned or hacked.
However, when officers seized his device, they discovered conversation between Batson, Rosegold, Akinwunmi and others about hacking, buying and selling of username and password lists, configuration files and personal details.
"No one should think cybcercrime is victimless or that they can get away with it," Andrew Shorrock, the National Crime Agency's senior investigation officer said. "The NCA will pursue and identify offenders and any conviction can be devastating to their futures."