SAN FRANCISCO (TABLOID NEWS SERVICES) — One of cyberspace’s most shocking cases of hacking came to a pathetic close late last week when all the charges had to be dropped against a London kid who made himself famous by breaking into the Pentagon and touching off a nuclear weapons panic in the U.S. Air Force.

British prosecutors said it’s a waste of time and money to continue trying to convict 23-year-old Matthew “Kuji” Bevan, a hacker who made world headlines in 1995 when he was arrested along with his 16-year-old cohort Richard Pryce, aka “Datastream Cowboy.”

Led by Pryce, the pair apparently broke into U.S. military computers at the Griffiss Air Force Base in New York and accessed sensitive weapons information. And from there they hopped over to the computers of a nuclear research facility on the Korean peninsula.

U.S. military officials were so confused by the two hackers they thought at least one of Bevan’s break-ins was the work of an Eastern European spy ring. And when the military saw that the intruders had used USAF computers to hack a link into the Korean military site, then copy information back on the USAF computers, they were positively panicked. The military cyber-cops didn’t know if the Korean computers were in North or South Korea — and they feared the hack would be seen by crazy Communist North Korea as an act of war.

According to the tech news service Newsbytes, the incident touched off a “diplomatic crisis” between the U.S. and South Korea, where the facility turned out to be located, although other reports have portrayed the pair’s adventures as mostly harmless.

It was an embarrassing shock to U.S. military’s cyber cops when it was revealed that their online assailants were a pair of bored London kids.

When cops arrived to arrest Pryce at his parents’ home in 1995, he reportedly curled up in a ball on the floor and cried.

Pryce was fined nearly $2,000 for the crime back in 1996, but Bevan’s case dragged on until last week.

It finally ran out of steam when British prosecutors realized they weren’t going to get any help from their American colleagues, according to Newsbytes.

The case was dumped when the court and prosecutors were told that classified military information would be made public during the trial, and that the case would be incredibly expensive to prosecute. Witnesses would have to be flown from the U.S. and the technical details would take months to explain, the court heard.

Worse, the government was pretty sure it would lose, because the U.S. was refusing to turn over information about how it traced and identified the hackers.

“The U.S. cyber sleuth teams simply did not understand the difference between conducting a technical investigation and producing robust admissible evidence,” said Peter Sommer, a senior fellow at the London School of Economics’ Computer Security Research Center, according to Newsbytes. Sommer testified as a defense expert for both Pryce and Bevan.

Sommer said the U.S. government had flubbed the case from the start. The government detectives “neglected to produce ‘before’ and ‘after’ file dumps of the target computers,” Sommer said. Such raw data dumps could show what changed the hackers made while they had access to the USAF systems.

And the Americans refused to turn over the source code to the software it used to monitor the hackers’ attacks. Without that, the court would have no opportunity to test the software to make sure it was working right.

Bevan left the court last week without talking to reporters. The only word came from his lawyers, who said the young man was happy it was over.