By PETER GRIFFIN
Jurors were given a step-by-step guide to hacking techniques yesterday, in the first such simulation carried out in a New Zealand court.
Former website administrator Andrew Garrett is on trial in the Manukau District Court on 10 charges of fraud, wilful damage and threatening to cause damage.
The charges
relate to events nearly three years ago when Garrett allegedly used the common hacking program Back Orifice to obtain passwords of customers of internet service providers Xtra, ihug and BestNet.
Using a cloned copy of Garrett's hard drive and projecting images of Back Orifice at work against the court wall, crown witness and security expert Daniel Ayers said a disk found by police at Garrett's house contained incriminating computer logs which showed he had probed other computers to obtain internet passwords.
The logs, said Mr Ayers, also revealed that Garrett had used Back Orifice to snoop around other people's computers, looking at picture files, their "little black book" of e-mail addresses and taking "snapshots" of their computer screens when they were on the internet.
The presence of an extension to Back Orifice called Butt Trumpet was also found on Garrett's computer.
The program allowed an e-mail to be sent to his computer every time an account holder connected to the internet, enabling the remote probes to take place.
Garrett's defence so far has centred on the point that he could have unwittingly infected other users' computers or may even have been the subject of a virus infection himself.
Lawyer Michael Levett said Garrett's computer might have been controlled remotely.
The trial is scheduled to run for up to four weeks.
