Leader: Stupidest 'hacker' ever revealed

A Southampton man has been jailed for two years after he blackmailed US porn-peddler Playboy over the threat of exposing customer names and addresses which he had stolen from a compromised server.

On the surface it sounds like a pretty vindictive and malicious crime, but in actuality he had none of the details he was demanding.

You assume therefore that he was done for fraud - a crime taken very seriously by most courts. So what sum of money was he demanding? Just $100.

(If anybody has seen the first Austin Powers movie, the actions of Simon Jones - the convicted fraudster in question - would appear to be a homage to Dr Evil who rather anachronistically held the whole world to ransom for the princely sum of $1m after emerging from cryogenic freezing.)

The only thing we can think of is that the judge jailed him for lack of ambition... that and gross stupidity.

His undoing was the fact that he provided his bank details for the publishing giant to pay the cash into. silicon.com would love to see whether they managed to keep a straight face while they did it.

In his defence Jones said he wasn't in it for the money, but even the most confused of British judges has probably worked that one out already.

He said he did it because he was bored with his mundane life stacking supermarket shelves and was bitter about not finding a job in IT. Now with a conviction against him for hacking (of sorts), he may find that even more difficult and the whole situation actually leaves you feeling a little sorry for a man who was clearly just a bit too stupid for his own good.

There are a lot of cyber-criminals out there who've escaped with more lenient sentences for far more serious crimes. By the time we've all stopped laughing about the hapless idiot and his ridiculous blackmail scam (and it may take a while) it's likely he'll still have around a year to serve in prison.