Jail chaos as hacker is left in charge of computer system

A jailed hacker shut down a prison's entire computer system - after bosses gave him the job of programming it. Douglas Havard, 27, serving six years for stealing up to £6.5million using forged credit cards over the internet, was approached after governors wanted to create an internal TV station but needed a special computer program written.

He was left unguarded and hacked into the system's hard drive at Ranby Prison, near Retford, Notts. Then he set up a series of passwords so no one else could get into the system.



Havard was put in segregation as punishment. But he left the system crippled. A prison source said: "It's unbelievable that a criminal convicted of cyber-crime was allowed uncontrolled access to the hard drive. He set up such an elaborate array of passwords it took a specialist company to get it working."

A Prison Service spokesman said the breach was being investigated, adding: "Prisoners are not allowed unsupervised access to computers. The prisoner was not able to access records of any other prisoners."