Three University of Malta students and a lecturer, who faced criminal charges after revealing security vulnerabilities in an app with good intentions, have been granted a Presidential pardon under Article 93 of the Constitution of Malta, the government said Tuesday.
This development follows a political commitment by Prime Minister Robert Abela and a recommendation by the Cabinet of Ministers to ensure that the three young individuals and the lecturer would no longer face prosecution in connection with the ethical hacking case, the statement said.
The Prime Minister emphasised that the matter should not be approached solely from a legal perspective, but also from the standpoint of justice and fairness. He underlined the responsibility of the State to update national laws in line with evolving technological realities.
Through this political initiative, the government said it addressed the injustice faced by these individuals, exercising its constitutional prerogative to end the criminal proceedings against them entirely.
Last March, the students and the lecturer were charged with hacking Malta's largest student app, FreeHour, more than two years after they reported security vulnerabilities to the company.
The students are Michael Debono, 22, Giorgio Grigolo, 21, and Luke Bjorn Scerri, 23. They were all accused of gaining unauthorised access to the app.
Grigolo was also charged with making an alteration to the app even though he changed the app back to its original state shortly after.
Lecturer Mark Joseph Vella, 45, was charged as an accomplice, after proofreading a certain email sent to Freehour by the students.
Back in October 2022, the students scanned the app's software and discovered vulnerabilities in it.
Giorgio Grigolo made a change to the app to inform FreeHour of this vulnerability. He then took a screenshot of the change and then reverted everything back to its original state shortly after.
The students then emailed FreeHour's founder, Zach Ciappara, outlining their findings and asked for a reward in return for finding this mistake.
After receiving the email, Ciappara reported the matter to the police and an investigation was opened.
PN statement
In a statement, the Nationalist Party noted with satisfaction the Government's decision to grant a presidential pardon to the three students and a lecturer from the University of Malta who were taken to court over ethical hacking.
However, the PN reiterated the position it took last March, that the law should be amended to prevent such a case from happening again.
Instead of letting them face criminal charges in court and only now issuing a presidential pardon, "Robert Abela should have changed the law from the outset, so that these three students and the lecturer would never have had to face prosecution at all," the PN said.
The government had every opportunity to amend the law - as the PN had urged from the very beginning - to ensure that no one would need to be found guilty first and then pardoned afterwards, especially when there was consensus that no wrongdoing had been committed, the PN said.
"Nevertheless, in order to present himself as a hero, Robert Abela was willing to subject these individuals to an ordeal, allowing them to be charged in court with criminal offences, just so that he could later boast that Cabinet had recommended a pardon," the PN added.
The PN also noted that the Government's statement refers both to the Prime Minister's political commitment and to the need for this issue to be addressed legally, but nowhere does it provide any guarantee that the law will actually be changed. For this reason, the PN renewed its call for the government to immediately present the necessary legal amendments so that this law can be revised without delay.
"We should never have reached a point where three young people and a lecturer were subjected to such an ordeal, when the Government could have easily taken earlier action to prevent it," the PN said.