Jury out in UK teen hacker case

The jury retired on Wednesday afternoon to consider its verdict in the case of the UK teenager accused of bringing down the computer systems of a major US port with a denial of service attack.

Aaron Caffrey, 19, has pleaded not guilty to unauthorised modifications of a computer contrary to Section 3 of the Computer Misuse Act 1990. The crime carries a maximum sentence of three years.

A denial of service attack on the Port of Houston in Texas in 2001 was traced to a computer at Caffrey's home but he claimed his computer had been hijacked by two hackers, known as dryice and frixion, using a Trojan Horse to remotely control his PC without his knowledge.

Caffrey said in his testimony that the hackers had used a wiping tool in the Trojan Horse to remove this evidence but the prosecution dismissed this as "technically impossible".

The prosecution counsel's expert technical witness dismissed the defence and said a forensic examination found no tell-tale evidence of his computer having been hacked or any data tampered with.

In the final day of testimony yesterday, a defence witness who was a friend of Caffrey's father, claimed it was technically possible for a Trojan to be written that could wipe evidence of it ever being there. However the court heard that Bowers, who was not on the register of expert witnesses or a member of the British Computer Society, had never seen this actually happen and was basing his testimony on what he had read in computer journals.

Judge Loraine-Smith has ordered the 11 remaining jurors to retire until they can deliver a unanimous verdict.