Chu Ting-ting, 23, given order after being found guilty of launching denial-of-service attack in which site was accessed more than 7,000 times in 24 minutes
CHRIS.LAU@SCMP.COM
PUBLISHED : Wednesday, 11 November, 2015, 5:17pm
UPDATED : Wednesday, 11 November, 2015, 5:17pm
Chu Ting-ting, 23, was given a community service order. Photo: David Wong
A sales supervisor who accessed the Hong Kong Police Force’s website more than 7,000 times in 24 minutes in a cyberattack at the outset of last year’s Occupy protests has been ordered to perform 80 hours of community service.
Chu Ting-ting, 23, was given a community service order today at Eastern Court after she was found guilty earlier of launching a denial-of-service attack on the website.
Chu’s attack, which took place between 12.53am and 1.17am on October 4, days after the 79-day pro-democracy demonstrations began, flooded the police website with 7,467 access attempts, causing it to crash.
Such denial-of-service attacks work by a hacker overloading a website with excessive net traffic, the court heard earlier.
Chu had pleaded not guilty to one count of criminal damage.
Deputy Magistrate Peter Chu Chi-keung found the defendant guilty last month after rejecting the American-educated defendant’s defence that she lacked the knowledge to carry out the attack.
The defendant claimed she had not a clue what “hacking” meant, even though the magistrate found her work was related to computers and that she had mentioned the word in an interview with police.
The magistrate warned the defendant she must cooperate with the probation officer assigned to her today during the brief sentencing session.
The court heard earlier that under caution, Chu had told police officers she was aware of a cyberattack launched by hacker group Anonymous, an internet activist group which has carried out social justice campaigns using denial-of-service attacks as one of its tools.
Chu told police at the time that her computer had crashed after she clicked on a link on the group’s Facebook page.
In mitigation, her lawyer said the defendant was supporting the pro-democracy movement and that the attack had caused no actual damage to the police website.
http://m.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-crime/article/1877799/saleswoman-gets-community-service-cyberattack-hong-kong
