LONDON: Two British hackers behind a 2024 cyberattack on London’s public transport body which cost £29 million ($39.16 million) to fix were each sentenced on Thursday to 5-1/2 years in jail.
Thalha Jubair, 20, and Owen Flowers, 18, pleaded guilty last month to hacking Transport for London (TfL), which had been blamed on hacking collective “Scattered Spider.”
Jubair and Flowers hacked TfL between August 31 and September 3, 2024, working up to 16 hours a day – Jubair from his parents’ flat in east London, Flowers in his grandmother’s home in central England – after gaining access to TfL systems.
Jubair broadcast a livestream of the hack which Flowers watched, with the video found on Flowers’ laptop providing key evidence, prosecutor Mark Fenhalls said.
The pair could have “shut down TfL completely” and the attack was stopped only when TfL pulled the plug on their computer systems, Fenhalls said. The damage caused took six months to fix.
