Teen cleared of hacking charge

The UK teenager accused of launching a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) on the Port of Houston's IT systems was acquitted at Southwark Crown Court today.

The jury returned a unanimous verdict after after three hours and found Aaron Caffrey, 19, from Dorset not guilty of a single charge of unauthorised modification of computer material.

Both the defence and prosecution acknowledged that the attack had originated from Caffrey's computer, but the defendant claimed his computer had been taken over by a hacker using a Trojan Horse program.

During the trial Caffrey was accused of being part of an elite hacking group, and having a DDoS script and the IP addresses of more than 11,000 vulnerable servers on his computer.

The denial of service attack on 20 September, 2001, which was traced to a computer at Caffrey's home by US police, was allegedly aimed at taking a South African chatroom user called 'Bokkie' after she had made comments on IRC attacking the US. The prosecution claimed Caffrey took offence at the comments because his girlfriend at the time, Jessica, was American.

While giving evidence last Friday, Caffrey said that although Jessica was his girlfriend at the time and he had known her for about a year, he had never had a sexual relationship with her or even met her.

Caffrey denied any knowledge of the attack and claimed that "evidence" of the attack, in the form of log files, was planted. This theory was contested by Professor Neil Barrett, an expert witness at the trial who told the court that, after examining the physical location of data blocks on Caffrey's computer, there was no evidence that the log files had been altered at a later date.

If found guilty, Caffrey, who suffers from autistic disorder Asperger's syndrome, could have faced up to three years in prison.

Munir Kotadia writes for ZDNet UK