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Pastimes : Investment Chat Board Lawsuits -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tommy Hicks who wrote (5210)	10/11/2003 1:58:16 PM
From: scion	Respond to of 12465

Hacker Suspect Tells Court His PC Was Hijacked Fri Oct 10,12:13 PM ET Add Technology - Internet Report to My Yahoo! By Bernhard Warner, European Internet Correspondent LONDON (Reuters) - An English teenager, charged with hacking in and crippling a U.S. seaport's computer navigation system, told a court on Friday his PC was hijacked by hackers posing as him. Aaron Caffrey, 19, from Dorset, southwest England, was charged last year under the 1990 Computer Misuse Act and accused of unleashing a flood of data capable of knocking computers offline on a Houston, Texas, seaport in September 2001. He denies the charges. Caffrey is accused of triggering the paralyzing data blast on a vital computer server used to coordinate ship movements in the Houston port -- the sixth biggest shipping port in the world, the court heard this week. Caffrey said while the attack apparently was triggered from his computer, he was not the person behind it. He said his machine may have been taken over by another individual or group who then set the digital onslaught in motion. "My computer was completely and utterly vulnerable to many exploits," Caffrey told Southwark Crown Court. The soft-spoken Caffrey gave the court a technical description of how computer hackers can assume the identity of unsuspecting computer users through a variety of tricks. Caffrey, who was the defense's lone expert witness, said hackers could have fished out Caffrey's security password to steal his online identity. Or, he said, they could have installed a "Trojan" program -- so named because they can take over a machine remotely. Caffrey faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison if found guilty. A verdict was not expected until next week. Prosecutors said Caffrey unleashed the attack to seek revenge on a South African chat room user called "Bokkie" who made anti-American comments in a chat room session in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. Caffrey took offence at the comments because his then girlfriend was American, prosecutor Paul Addison told the court. The prosecution said the Houston computer server was caught in the digital cross-fire. The attacker intended to infiltrate the machine and then launch from a remote location a digital attack on the chat room user, the prosecution said. story.news.yahoo.com