August 25, 2015 - A man has been given an 18 month prison sentence for hacking into hundreds of phones belonging to Aviva in an act of revenge against his former company, a security vendor contracted by the insurance firm.

According to the BBC, Richard Neale pleaded guilty to the attack which he carried out in a bid to scupper an Aviva security network contract for Esselar, a firm he helped found and had been a director of.

Having fallen out with his former colleagues, last May Neale hacked into the Aviva system on the night that Esselar was giving a security demonstration, wiping data from around 900 phones.

The move led Aviva to scrap its relationship with the vendor, costing it an £80,000-per-year contract.

Neale also created a fake identity within Esselar's system and used it to reject expense claims from former colleagues and hacked the firm's Twitter account, replacing its logo with a bleeding heart to indicate its security had been compromised.