Judgement Day

of London Business School, had examined a large amount of technical evidence presented in the prosecution’s papers. In an independent report running to more than 23 pages, the experts stated that the hackers had caused less havoc than the prose- cution alleged. In addition, Pad’s solicitor asked Dr Mills to specifically review, in a separate report, the evidence supporting the prosecution’s large damage claim.

Dr Mills stated that one of the police expert witnesses, a British Telecom employee, had said that Digital recommended a full rebuild of the system at the earliest possible opportu- nity — and at considerable cost. However, the BT expert had not stated that the cost was £250 000 nor even mentioned if the cost quote which had been given had actually been accepted.

In fact, Dr Mills concluded that there was no supporting evidence at all for the quarter of a million pound claim. Not only that, but any test of reason based on the evidence provided by the prosecution showed the claim to be completely ridiculous.

In a separate report, Dr Mills stated that: i) The machine concerned was a Vax 6320, this is quite

a powerful ‘mainframe’ system and could support

several hundreds of users. ii) That a full dump of files takes 6 tapes, however since

the type of tape is not specified this gives no real indi-

cation of the size of the filesystem. A tape could vary

from 0.2 Gigabytes to 2.5 Gigabytes. iii) The machine was down for three days. With this brief information it is difficult to give an accurate cost for restoring the machine, however an over estimate would be: i) Time spent in restoring the system, 10 man days at

£300 per day; £3000. ii) Lost time by users, 30 man days at £300 per day;

£9000.

The total cost in my opinion is unlikely to be higher than £12 000 and this itself is probably a rather high estimate. I cer- tainly cannot see how a figure of £250 000 could be justified.