Five employees at UK IT security reseller Quadsys have pled guilty to hacking a rival company’s servers.
The group—owner Paul Streeter, managing director Paul Cox, director Alistair Barnard, account manager Steve Davies and security consultant Jon Townsend—admitted hacking into a rival reseller’s database to steal customer and pricing information.
The charge, “obtaining unauthorised access to computer materials to facilitate the commission of an offence,” is punishable by up to five years in prison, or a fine.
According to the Register, the five are due to be sentenced in September when a further charge of “obtaining unauthorised access to computer materials with intent to commit an offence” will also be heard.
The group were originally arrested in March of last year by the Thames Valley Police, on suspicion of “conspiracy to commit computer misuse offences; unauthorised access with intent to commit or facilitate commission of further offences; and conspiracy to enter into/be concerned in the acquisition/retention/use of controls of criminal property."
The defendants were subsequently charged in August of that year. Charges of “conspiracy to commit fraud by false representation” were dropped in favor of the computer misuse charges, the Register said.
In March this year, the five pled not guilty to the charge of “securing unauthorised access to computer material with intent, contrary to the Computer Misuse Act 1990.” MD Paul Cox was also charged with Blackmail, which he denied.
In May this year a judge rejected a claim of “abuse of process application” made by the defendants, who had asked for the charges relating to Section One of the Computer Misuse Act to be thrown out.
The company is based in Oxford and works with Cisco, Citrix, DELL, HP, IBM, Kaspersky, Lenovo, McAfee, Microsoft, Ruckus, Sophos, Symantec, VMware and more.
Photo © Andrey Burmakin