Glenn Steven Mangham, a 25-year-old UK man, has been accused of engaging in a hacking spree against popular social network Facebook, from April 17 to May 9 this year; and has been charged with five counts of illegal hacking.

Mangham - who supposedly does not have a Facebook profile - was arrested in early June, by officers from the Central e-Crime Unit of the Metropolitan Police, on suspicion of "computer hacking offences" before being charged earlier this month.

The charges that Mangham - who appeared briefly in Westminster magistrates' court on Wednesday, before being released on bail - faces in the first of its kind case in Britain include: having "made, adapted, supplied or offered to supply" a computer program to hack into a Facebook server.

The court heard that Mangham - a student hacker from York - made use of "considerable technical expertise" for repeatedly bypassing the security at Facebook, and targeting at least three different services used by the social network.

According to a report in the Telegraph, the services that Mangham targeted included a Facebook "puzzle server," a "mailman" server, as well as a restricted part of a "Facebook Phabricator server."

With the judge, Nicholas Evans, having described the allegations against Mangham as "serious", under the Computer Misuse Act, one of the Scotland Yard sources also told The Telegraph that detectives were not aware of any hacking attempts "to this extent" on the Facebook site in Britain.