Hackers target UK abortion site after Anonymous member faces jail

A member of hacking group Anonymous was jailed for two years and eight months after he stole 10,000 personal records from the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) website.

James Jeffrey, 27, hacked the site after “disagreeing” with his sister’s choice to terminate her pregnancy.

He planned to publish the records from the abortion provider, which treats around 55,000 people a year, online but decided against it.

Since his arrest on March 9, there have been 2,500 attempts to hack into BPAS’s website by “copycat hackers”, a third of which have been traced to North America and a third to Russia.

Tactics by anti-abortion campaigners have become more militant in recent weeks, with BPAS recently calling police after women were being filmed arriving and leaving one of its London clinics.

A spokesman from the charity downplayed the incidents, saying: “This is significantly lower than anything we might have anticipated. There was no impact on our services and women's records are completely secure.”