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The Telegraph published the story of Glen Mangham, aged 26, a British student that could have “could have brought down the £31 billion empire.”

Glen Mangham, a computers enthusiast, managed to infiltrate into Facebook servers from his bedroom and steal confidential information, was charged with 8 months in prison.

In last year’s April, Mangham managed to brake into a Facebook employee’s account, Stefan Parker, accessed the source code of the famous social network, then downloaded it on his personal computer, writes The Telegraph.

The information theft alerted the authorities throughout the world, including the FBI, who feared that they are dealing an “industrial espionage” case.

In his defense, the young man who suffers from a mild form of autism, said that he broke into the Facebook servers to show the company’s employees the vulnerabilities and exploits and how they can be eliminated.

Still, Judge Alistair McCreath said that the boy’s actions were “not just a bit of harmless experimentation” as they could have ended in disastrous way for Facebook. “He could have brought down the whole empire,” as Mangham accessed the very core of a colossal international business and stole confidential information, Judge McCreath explained.

Prosecutor Sandip Patel said that this is “the most extensive and grave incident of social media hacking” he have ever seen before. Patel explained that Mangham accessed the private conversations between Facebook employees as well as the source-code, which is Facebook’s intellectual propriety and gives the social network value on the market. The theft triggered an ample and long FBI and UK police investigation.

The young hacker said that the Facebook employees should be “grateful” to him.

Glenn Mangham admitted in front of the prosecutors that in the first place he found a way to access a website that tests the potential future Facebook employees, only after he was able to break into the main servers. Once there, he bypassed Stefan Parker’s password and started to download confidential information.

Although he is aware that he broke the law, Mangham says that the Facebook employees should be “grateful” to him. The young man said the court that all he wanted was to identify the vulnerabilities in the system then compile a report to show the Facebook employees how to fix the problems. This seems plausible as a while ago Yahoo payed Mangam £7,000 to help them find system exploits.

The Telegraph writes that Facebook, a company worth of £31 billion (according to 2011 estimations), discovered the theft during a routine check and alerted the authorities soon after. Mark Zuckerberg’s company financed the investigation with $200,000 writes the source.

Mangham was arrested in June 2011 and pleaded not guilty at three out of four charges: he admitted he stole confidential information, but he claimed that it was not for commercial purposes.

Asked why he didn’t let Facebook know about the system vulnerabilities as soon as he discovered them, the student responded with irony that he wanted to create a “nice dramatic effect.”

The Telegraph writes that Mangam runs an online security consultancy firm and that he is a huge fan of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novels, the creator of Sherlock Holmes.