Porn Hacker Jailed for Drugs

The St. Petersburg Times

Published: March 26, 2010 (Issue # 1559)

MOSCOW — A Siberian hacker who streamed a pornographic film on an electronic billboard in central Moscow in January has been sentenced to five years in prison for selling marijuana, Life News reported Wednesday.

Igor Blinnikov, 41, was sentenced by a Novorossiisk court for selling 20 grams of marijuana to undercover narcotics officers in a sting operation last May, the report said.

Blinnikov was briefly detained at the time and released with a written promise not to leave town.

His porn stunt made national headlines in January when he hacked into a server of an advertising agency operating a billboard next to the Interior Ministry building on the Garden Ring.

Blinnikov inserted a two-minute clip with an interracial sex scene into the queue of video ads shown on the billboard, causing a traffic jam during the 20 minutes that it played.

Investigators tracked down the hacker — who used servers in Novosibirsk, Nalchik and Grozny to cover his tracks — a month later. Blinnikov told them that he had done it for fun.