In a sentence ordered by US District Judge Susan Wigenton in Newark, New Jersey, on Monday, convicted hacker Andrew Auernheimer was handed a 41-month jail term for breaching AT&T's networks to gain illegal access to email addresses and other information of over 120,000 iPad subscribers.

Auernheimer was accused of breaking into the online network of AT&T in 2010, and disclosing the email addresses and other personal details of iPad users to the online news site Gawker.

Along with ordering the prison sentence to Auernheimer, who describes himself as a "security research" hacker and is known online as "weev," Judge Wigenton also sentenced the hacker to an additional three years of supervised release. In addition, Auernheimer was also ordered him to make a payment in excess of $73,000 in restitution for damages which had resulted from his hacking activities.

While ordering the sentence to Auernheimer, the Judge ignored the leniency plea which Auernheimer's attorneys had filed in a pre-sentencing memo with the court last week.

The argument which Auernheimer's attorneys put firth while seeking leniency for their client was that since his actions were neither motivated by fraud nor had they caused any direct harm to AT&T's systems, the maximum punishment he deserved for his offenses was months of non-custodial probation.