The defendant, Sven Jaschan, 19, was found guilty of computer sabotage and illegally altering data, the court in the northwestern town of Verden said.
Serco, admonished by MPs after it was revealed to have altered data about out-of-hours doctor services in Cornwall, was paid £10m by NHS England for providing healthcare.
The hacker, Kevin Mitnick, 39, of Thousand Oaks, Calif., served five years in federal prison for stealing software and altering data at Motorola, Novell, Nokia, Sun Microsystems and the University of Southern California.
Unlike recent episodes in which Web sites were defaced or credit card records were taken from an online music retailer, this week's attacks have not involved stolen or altered data.
As a member of the Bureau of Economic Analysis's advisory panel and a professional user of government statistics for 35 years, I am not aware of any instance in which government statisticians have altered data under political pressure.
Offensive operations intended to alter data, turn off networks or destroy machines — which is what made the Iran operation so complex and unusual — are a far newer phenomenon.
Serco told the committee that two managers who no longer worked for the company had been responsible for altering data but gave "no convincing explanation" for why they would do so since they were not paid bonuses, according to the MPs.
Utgoff isn't afraid that the Trump Administration will meddle with statistical methodologies or the numbers they produce; that would require co-opting thousands of career government surveyors, statisticians, and economists in an effort to alter data collected from hundreds of thousands of businesses and citizens.
At a session near Valentine's Day, foil-covered Nestlé Crunch hearts were given as prizes for those who correctly identified codes that must be entered on computer screens when aid officers alter data (Congress grants them "professional judgment" to make such changes).
