Moscow hacker who put porn on billboard gets jail term Published duration 24 March 2011

image caption Moscow's Garden Ring Road is notorious for its heavy traffic

A hacker who placed pornography on a video billboard above Moscow's inner ring road has been jailed for one and a half years, Russian media report.

Igor Blinnikov, 40, uploaded the video on 14 January last year from his home computer in Novorossiysk, a city 1,225km (760 miles) south of Moscow.

The shipyard fitter confessed to the offence, describing it as a "bad joke".

He was earlier sentenced to four and a half years' hard labour for trying to sell 13 grams of marijuana.

Speaking after the new sentence, he said: "I expected a bit less."

He will appeal against it, hoping to get his jail term reduced.

Reporting the incident last year, a commentary on Russian news website lenta.ru entitled "XXX in Moscow!" noted that the scandalous video had created a traffic jam on the ring road.

The billboard, near the Serpukhovskoy Tunnel on Moscow's busy Garden Ring Road, was described as being 6 by 9m (20 x 30ft).

'Something to do'

Stills of the offending video, brightly displayed above evening traffic, appeared on online media in Russia.

Speaking to journalists before his sentence, Blinnikov said he had hacked into the billboard "just for something to do" and, when asked how he had managed to do it, replied: "It would take too long to explain."

Asked had he taken drugs before the hacking, he said "only beer".

He had downloaded the pornographic video from the internet at random and had chosen the billboard at random too, he added.

"I decided to confess because they'd caught me," Blinnikov was quoted as saying by Russia's Interfax news agency.

Computers were just a hobby, he said, that he had followed for five years. A trained fitter, he had been working unofficially as a driver.

Blinnikov added that, before his crime, he had not visited Moscow for 20 years.