Mr Cuthbert denied hacking into the DEC website

IT contractor Daniel Cuthbert, 28, of Whitechapel, east London, accessed the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) website on New Year's Eve 2004.

In his defence, he said he had been testing the security of the site after making a donation himself.

He was found guilty at Horseferry Magistrates' Court of one offence under the Computer Misuse Act and fined �400.

The prosecution said it accepted Cuthbert was not attempting to be fraudulent or to make money by hacking.

Computer crime legislation

The Metropolitan Police said, however, the case was a powerful message to those who considered hacking a kind of sport.

They added that Cuthbert's attempt to breach the DEC server had been immediately picked up and blocked.

He denied the charge of causing a computer to perform a function which intended to secure unauthorised access to a program or data held in a computer.

Det Ch Insp Bob Burls, of the Computer Crime Unit said the case fully tested current computer crime legislation and showed that the site's security systems worked.

Tens of thousands of people used the DEC web pages to make online donations to those hit by the Boxing Day tragedy.

The DEC appeal raised more than �300m for the victims of the tsunami, which claimed up to 300,000 lives.