Bala Cynwyd man sentenced to prison for hacking water utilities

A 42-year-old Montgomery County man has been sentenced to a year and a day in federal prison for hacking computers that caused a business disruption to municipal water utilities, prosecutors said Thursday.

Adam Flanagan, of Bala Cynwyd, had pleaded guilty in March to two counts of unauthorized access to a protected computer and was sentenced Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Paul Diamond.

Flanagan worked as a radio frequency engineer for a company that made remote meter readers for utilities in municipalities throughout the Eastern United States. After he was terminated by the company, he hacked the meters through the Internet and disabled them. Municipal water authorities were then required to send workers to read individual meters because billing data was inaccurate. Flanagan's former employer spent a large amount of time conducting forensic examinations of the readers to figure out what happened, prosecutors said.

The case was originally handled by federal prosecutors in North Carolina and then was transferred to Pennsylvania after Flanagan was identified as the culprit.