An expert witness in the case of a teenager accused of accidentally launching a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on a major US port said on Thursday there was no indication that evidence had been planted on the suspect's hard drive.

The defence counsel for Aaron Caffrey, who is on trial at Southwark Crown Court, had said that his client's computer could have been compromised by a hacker who had altered the system's log files -- which record how the machine is being used -- and staged an attack from the teenager's computer.

But Professor Neil Barrett, technical director at Information Risk Management and an expert witness at the trial, told the court that after examining the physical location of data blocks on Caffrey's computer, there was no evidence that the log files had been altered at a later date.

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