Occupy 'cyberattack' led to Hong Kong police website crash after site accessed more than 7,000 times in 24 minutes, court hears
A woman allegedly caused the police force's website to crash by using software to access it more than 7,000 times in 24 minutes last October during the early days of the Occupy protests, a court heard yesterday.
The defendant, Chu Ting-ting, a 23-year-old sales supervisor at a food shop, pleaded not guilty at Eastern Court to one count of criminal damage and an alternative charge of obtaining access to a computer with criminal intent.
At about 11pm on October 3, employees of the contractor that manages government websites noticed they were all loading very slowly, said Au Yeung Chi-yung, a site manager for that company.
Au Yeung - also an information technology security expert - said his team launched an investigation after the incident. He said multiple requests from the same internet protocol address had flooded the police website.
"That was a suspicious and abnormal browse of the website," he said.
The barrage of requests to the site constituted what's known as a denial-of-service attack, prosecutors said. Such an attack is intended to make a server unavailable by overloading it with traffic and causing it to crash.
The court heard Chu's alleged attack took place from 12.53am to 1.17am on October 4 with 7,467 attempts to load the site.
Asked by prosecutor Priscilla Lam how it could affect normal users, Au Yeung said some of them could not load the webpage and so could not see its contents.
Under caution, Chu told police officers that she was aware of a cyberattack launched by hacker group Anonymous. The loosely affiliated group frequently undertakes activism and social justice campaigns using denial-of-service attacks as one of its tools. Chu told police at the time that her computer crashed after she clicked a link on the group's Facebook page.
The trial continues today before Deputy Magistrate Peter Hui Shiu-keung.
