A man pleaded guilty to hacking into the British Pregnancy Advisory Service’s (BPAS) website last week.

James Jeffery, 27 of Castle Street, West Midlands, appeared at Westminster Magistrates Court on Saturday where he pleaded guilty to two charges under the Computer Misuse Act 1990.

He will be sentenced at a later date and faces up to 12 months in prison.

Jeffery hacked into the BPAS website last week and stole the contact details of people using its online contact form. The charity reported the incident to the police and took out an injunction to prevent publication of the details. At no point were patient records compromised as they are kept separately.

A BPAS spokeswoman told civilsociety.co.uk that: “We are obviously very pleased that everything has been resolved very quickly.”

She revealed that over the weekend the organisations website had been subjected to “spammers trying to block up our system using the email request feature”, but that it had coped with the activity.

She said that “we will be taking advice from the police about whether there is anything more we could do” but added that "this level of cyber attack can be very hard to withstand".