The case against a 20-year-old Coquitlam man accused of “spam-botting” an Amazon subsidiary was before a justice of the peace at Port Coquitlam provincial court this morning (Thursday).
Brandan Apple, who did not appear in court, is scheduled to return on March 1 on a mischief charge 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, according to court documents.
Twitch is a streaming platform of Amazon, an electronic commerce and cloud computing giant.
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 service providers Shaw, Paypal Holdings, Cloudflare, WhoisPrivacy Corp. and WhoisGuard Inc.
Investigators with the BC RCMP’s Integrated Technology Crime Unit (ITCU) were made aware of his activity on April 7, 2017, E-Division spokesperson Cpl. Janelle Shoihet told The Tri-City News; the unit, along with Coquitlam RCMP, executed a search warrant on Apple’s home on June 22.
If convicted, Apple could face up to 10 years in jail.
A Supreme Court 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.
