Pirate Bay co-founder arrested on hacking charges | Sedulity Groups
A co-founder of BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay has been arrested in Sweden over allegations he was involved in hacking a contractor to the country's tax authority.
Sweden's public prosecutions authority suspected Gottfrid Svartholm to be one of three involved in continued breaches of a core database held by contractor Logica over a two-year period.
The hacks, which began in 2010 and continued until April this year, reportedly involved accessing the database containing civic registration numbers for people with protected identities, with thousands of such numbers copied by the three over the breach period.
No information has surfaced as to what the intention of the data breach was, but since the registration numbers are recorded on a large number of official and private sector documents, they are believed to be useful in facilitating identity theft.
Two Swedish men were charged with hacking Logica in June this year, according to Svenska Dagbladeto. One of the men was released pending trial but the second, a 35-year old from Stockholm said to have been involved with the organisation that started The Pirate Bay, has remained in custody since April.
Svartholm was arrested on Swedish soil on September 11.
He had originally been detained at his home in Cambodia, however, and subsequently extradited to Sweden. He had fled to Cambodia to avoid trial in Sweden over copyright infringement while running The Pirate Bay.
Svartholm and three The Pirate Bay associates Peter Sunde, Carl Lundström and Fredrik Neijj were sentenced to prison for copyright infringement in 2009, and fines of $6.72 million.