Teen rides Trojan Horse defense
The UK teenager accused of launching a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) on the Port of Houston's IT systems was found not guilty at Southwark Crown Court on Friday of unauthorized modification of computer material.
Even though both the defense and prosecution acknowledged that the attack had originated from Caffrey's computer, the defendant claimed his computer had been taken over by a hacker using a Trojan Horse program.
Aaron Caffrey, 19, 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, but was found not guilty after the jury spent just a few hours considering the verdict before coming to a unanimous decision.
The denial of service attack on September 20, 2001, which was traced to a computer at Caffrey's home by U.S. police, was allegedly aimed at taking a South African chatroom user called 'Bokkie' offline after she had made comments on IRC attacking the United States. Caffrey allegedly took offense at the comments because his girlfriend at the time, Jessica, was American.
