A 21-year-old student was arrested on suspicion that he hacked the websites of a number of state institutions and the emails of ministers and councilors. According to the police, in 2015-2016 the young man hacked into about 400 electronic systems, illegally accessing information from the database, copying it and placing it on a blog, IPN reports.

Prosecutor Veaceslav Soltan told a news conference that the man hacked websites of financial-banking institutions, sites of political parties and emails of persons holding responsible posts as well as websites of media outlets, telecommunications companies and private enterprises.

The prosecutors suspect that the young man started to hack websites in order to show that the digital information is vulnerable and cannot be protected efficiently. Another version is that he hacked the websites in order to use them for fraudulent purposes. The young man used programs that scan networks and databases and could thus find faults in the digital information security system.

The blog on which the man placed the illegally obtained information was blocked. The prosecutors are to establish if these actions caused damage to the institutions. The man admitted his guilt and faces a fine of up to 80,000 lei or six years in jail. 

According to the prosecutors, an offense of the kind was last recorded in 2010, when a database of the State Tax Inspectorate was hacked.