A 20-year-old Coquitlam man will appear in Port Coquitlam provincial court next month to face a charge of mischief in connection with a hateful spambot attack against an Amazon subsidiary.
Brandan Lukus Apple was charged Dec. 1, 2017 for allegedly flooding Twitch Interactive Inc. with thousands of computer messages that shut down more than 1,000 of its broadcast channels with some 150,000 abusive messages; the cyberattack also disabled its chat feature.
A spambot is a computer program used to send unsolicited messages by email or online forums.
Twitch Interactive is a streaming platform spin-off of Amazon.com, which purchased the company for nearly $1 billion in 2014, and hosts more than two million people who earn cash by streaming video game-related content. Its spokesperson declined to comment on the case.
Apple is alleged to have created the cyberattack against Twitch between February and May 2017, which in turn prompted the company to file a civil lawsuit on March 31, 2017, against Shaw Communications, Paypal Holdings, Cloudflare, WhoisPrivacy Corp. and WhoisGuard Inc.
In its statement of claim, filed with the B.C. Supreme Court in Vancouver, Twitch noted the bots were posting between 34 and 699 spam messages per minute. It “received over 375 individual user reports regarding spam messages containing racism, homophobia, sexual harassment, false implications of viewbotting and soliciting child sex exploitation material.”
It also claimed Twitch employees spent 200 hours to find the source and located a site called chatsurge.net, registered to WhoisPrivacy and WhoisGuard, based in the Bahamas and Panama.
Twitch is seeking damages to cover the costs of the employee investigation and lost revenue.
In the meantime, a judge has also banned Apple from creating, selling or promoting "any robot, bot, crawler, spider, blacklisting software or other software" aimed at the company’s websites.
jcleugh@tricitynews.com
