Illegal Access to an Account on Social Network Can Result in 2 Years of Jail

Interesting news from Russia today again. I have already mentioned that the way social networks operate here in Russia is often more than peculiar and they can come up with the most unexpected approaches to how they work. Yet it looks like we are watching a new example of some civilization arriving to Russian social networking space with a new court proceeding reported today by the local media outlets.

The story is about a guy who accessed an account of his girlfriend on Odnoklassniki.ru, one of the largest social networks in Russia. In fact, the guy did not even need to hack the account as he simply tried a few combinations of symbols for her passwords and easily got in with her birth date as a password.

I have no idea why the guy wanted to access the account of the girl at all but the fact remains: when he got inside, he changed her existing login credentials, replaced her existing photo with a new one and read her personal conversations with the friends on the social network. The girl’s friends quickly let the account owner know of the new photo instead of the one they were supposed to see for her and she realized the account had been hacked.

In a very surprising move (to me, at least) the girl decided to go directly to police instead of trying to make the guy return her the access to her own account. And – again to my surprise given how difficult Russian law enforcement authorities are to communicate with – the actions of the guy were classified as illegal access to computerized information and also violation of privacy of correspondence. Both accusations could result in a court decision of sending the guy to jail for up to two years and he will now be waiting for hearings.

So even if the guy meant nothing but a joke he is now facing serious legal problems and it will be interesting to see what the court ruling will eventually be. But the simple conclusion is that a stupid online joke can easily get you into serious real-life problems so there must be even more reasons for hackers to think twice before accessing other peoples’ accounts on social networks.