Dutch Port Hacker Sentenced to Prison

The 44-year-old individual planted remote access malware on a logistics firm’s systems, with help from employees.

A Dutch national accused of hacking a logistics firm’s systems to gain access to port infrastructure in the Netherlands and Belgium has been sentenced to seven years in prison.

The 44-year-old individual, who was not named, was arrested after the authorities intercepted communications on the end-to-end encrypted phone network Sky ECC, which was shut down by law enforcement in 2021.

The service was almost exclusively used by large-scale criminals and had thousands of users, authorities said at the time. The CEO of Canada-based Sky Global, which owned Sky ECC, was indicted in the US only days after the network was taken down.

Other incriminating conversations were extracted from EncroChat, another encrypted network used by criminals. Authorities cracked the service in 2020, and 6,558 suspects were arrested by 2023.

The port hacker ...