A businessman who launched cyber attacks on a Hong Kong stock exchange website last year was jailed for nine months.
Tse Man-lai, 28, was earlier convicted in the District Court of two counts of obtaining access to a computer with criminal or dishonest intent.
Tse launched denial-of-service (DoS) attacks on HKExnews, a website providing price-sensitive information of listed companies, on August 12 and 13 last year. DoS attacks aim to prevent access to a website by overwhelming its capacity to handle website traffic.
Judge Kim Longley said Tse's move "caused such concern" to seven companies, including HSBC and Cathay Pacific Airways, that they suspended trading in their shares that had a combined value of HK$1.5 trillion.
Longley accepted the defence argument that Tse accessed the site only long enough to record photographs and video footage of his attacks, with the first lasting for 390 seconds and the next one for 70 seconds.
Tse was seeking to promote his firm, Pacswitch Globe Telecom, by demonstrating that the HKExnews website remained vulnerable after undergoing two distributed denial-of-service attacks from hundreds of personal computers outside Hong Kong, the court heard earlier.