The 21-year-old defendant, not pictured here, made his first remarks since being arrested in Photo: Eva Seider/Scanpix

Dane makes first remarks in hacker case

The Danish man accused alongside Pirate Bay co-found Gottfrid Svartholm Warg made his first public comments since being arrested in June 2013.

The Local (Denmark's news in English) | 10 September 2014

The 21-year-old Danish codefendant of Swedish ‘hacktivist’ Gottfrid Svartholm Warg made his first remarks in court on Wednesday in the largest hacking trial in Danish history.
  

In the Frederiksberg court, the Dane, who has been held in police custody since June 2013, refused to answer whether he knew Warg. 
 

“I won’t talk about anybody other than myself. You can ask anything you want about me, but a few days ago a fellow inmate was attacked. So no, I will not talk about Warg,” the man said, according to Jyllands-Posten.  
 

He did say that most people in the IT industry were familiar with Warg and under examination from the prosecution, the Dane admitted being in Cambodia at the same time as the Pirate Bay co-founder. The Dane said however that his trip was not to visit Warg but rather to smoke Cambodian cannabis. 

The defendant also admitted to having experience in hacking into secure systems, and said that he had worked in IT security for Danish, American and Australian companies.
  

See also: 'Hacktivist' accuses prosecution of smear campaign 
 

The prosecution presented emails showing the Dane discussing the US IT firm CSC, and logs of a chat in which he discussed emulating the type of system used by the company. The defendant admitted to discussing security holes within that type of system but said he had no actual plans to hack CSC or other systems.   
 

In the opening day of the trial, prosecutor Maria Cingali showed excerpts of chat logs between two hackers using the nicknames "My Evil Twin" and ‘Advanced Persistent Terrorist Threat’, who Danish police believe to be Svartholm and his Danish co-defendant respectively.
   

On Wednesday, the Dane said he had never referred to himself as ‘Advanced Persistent Terrorist Threat’ and denied that Warg is ‘My Evil Twin’. 
   

"If anyone had ever asked if they could call me Advanced Persistent Terrorist Threat, I would have said no," he said, according to Politiken's live blog.
  

The man's grandfather previously told The Local that the prosecution has a "very, very meagre case".
  

"They can't find their own legs, and I hope Maria Cingali, who has been a big loud mouth in this case, has a very heavy fall," he said. 
  

Warg and his Danish co-defendant are accused of hacking into Danish computer mainframes operated by US IT giant CSC, stealing social security numbers from Denmark's national driving licence database, illegally accessing information in a Schengen Region database and hacking into police email accounts.
  

The trial, described as the largest of its kind in Danish history, is scheduled to continue through October with the next hearing set for Friday. 
   

NOTE: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the Danish defendant admitted to being the man behind the nickname Advanced Persistent Terrorist Threat