Hong Kong university dropout launched 21,000 attacks in an hour on bank’s website, court told
Occupy protester argues he did not know what would happen when he clicked on Facebook page of hacker group Anonymous Asia
A City University dropout was accused of launching more than 21,000 attacks in one hour on Shanghai Commercial Bank’s website during the Occupy protests in 2014 after hacker group Anonymous Asia called for strikes against Hong Kong organisations.
But Chau Chun-fai told Sha Tin Court on Tuesday that he did not know what the Anonymous Asia page was about when he clicked on through a link on Facebook. He said he learnt only a few days later that he might have accessed a malicious site that would attack other pages.
Chau, 20, denies one count of criminal damage and an alternative charge of obtaining access to computer with criminal intent.
The bank’s information security officer Leung Kwok-kuen testified that he first saw the threat on October 12 on Anonymous Asia’s Facebook page, which read: “Fire the Shanghai Commercial Bank.”
Leung clicked the attached links and eventually found himself in his company’s official site.
A subsequent study of his company’s web server log found 21,829 requests from the same IP address to enter the site in the one hour from 2.37pm to 3.37pm that day.
Police located the IP address at Chau’s Sha Tin home. Inspector Lam Wing-hung said the distributed denial of service attacks blocked the server and prevented it from receiving normal requests to browse the site.
But defence counsel Christopher Lee argued that the alleged requests from his client took up only about 4 per cent of the total 504,592 entries logged in that hour and occupied just 0.29 per cent of the bank server’s 30-megabyte bandwidth.
He also pointed out that the bank did not suffer any losses, financially or in terms of customer accounts and transaction records. Leung agreed.
The trial continues before magistrate Colin Wong Sze-cheung.
