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(Article in update)
When, in 2010, he came to Sporting to take over the administration of the club’s computer systems, David Tojal, now 36, immediately started by “questioning the complexity of passwords.” “The passwords had three characters and the majority were SCP,” he declared, causing several laughter in the courtroom of the Campus da Justiça, including that of the defendant Rui Pinto, accused of a computer attack on that system.
The technician then changed the access level and forced, among other measures, to put six letters in the access code to the e-mail boxes. But soon after, the board asked him to make life easier for employees again. “It was too much for their heads, but I kept all six characters,” he said in Wednesday’s session.
The official recalled in court that the approximately 50/60 servers, which served around 600 employees, were “quite old” and that “it was not easy” to manage them. I’m trying to improve them little by little while I worked there, until 2015, when the attack now attributed to Rui Pinto brought down the entire system.
When this attack occurred, David Tojal recalled a valuable contract that could be of interest to a possible hacker: that of coach Jorge Jesús. “I realized that only two or three people had it,” from the management and the legal department, and that they had accessed the emails of these users through an IP located in Hungary, where Rui Pinto was detained.
The technician also recalled that at one point the attacks stopped occurring only at night and in the morning to “happen all the time.”
Before his testimony, which lasts for the afternoon, it was Rui Pinto’s defense that had to face the PJ specialist who analyzed a day in September when Sporting’s computer system was attacked until it collapsed. An investigation in which Rui Pinto dedicated himself to getting up and giving instructions on what the lawyers should ask. “He doesn’t know anything,” he finished whispering from his place. “We could hear the defendant’s clarifications if he wanted,” joked one of the judges at another time.
Soccer leaks. The RP3 disc that the PJ knew how to decipher and the judge’s doubts: Did Rui Pinto do it all alone?
After a session in which the judge clarified that she was judging a single person and that she had to understand the PJ’s reasoning to put Rui Pinto alone at the center of the investigation, and even in the morning, the specialist of the PJ Afonso Rodrigues explained that he was in charge of analyzing the computer attack on Sporting on September 22, highlighting four different moments of that day: an access through the illegal use of valid credentials and three other accesses whose sole objective was to bring down the entire system.
26,678 attack tools were used that day, with a few seconds between them so that the system could not respond to them and collapsed as it will have happened. “Humanly, it is impossible for one user or several users to make so many requests at the same time in the interval of 1 or 2 seconds,” police said.
– But can you see when the system collapsed?, then asked the lawyer Luísa Teixeira da Mota.
– Can’t you know the shockhe admitted, arguing that the document he was exhibiting could not draw that conclusion.
Afonso Rodrigues said, however, that the analysis of the accesses made to the computer system that September 22 was delivered to him in 2019, without knowing exactly when and how long it took to do so. And he believes that no one else in the PJ analyzed in detail the access to that computer system. Their findings culminated in a report that assumes the attacker was exploiting vulnerabilities in the system to try to break in and then crashed.
– I can’t gauge what the attack would be, the PJ specialist ended up saying.
– you don’t know how many days the break lasted because you only analyzed one dayreplied the lawyer, who recalled that those elements arrived in the process four years earlier.
Always in a strong attack on the evidence displayed by the PJ, Rui Pinto got up several times to tell the lawyers what to ask more.
– It was also good that the accused spoke, ended up mocking one of the judges.
– We transmit having what he transmits to us, appeased the lawyer Francisco Teixeira da Mota.
“Do you know what the 404 error code means?” Asks the lawyer, relaying the message from Rui Pinto. “I’m not really sure, but I think it’s the response error from the web server saying that the page is not available,” replied the policeman with fear. “What about the 401?” The attorney continued. “I do not see …”. “You don’t know anything!”, Reacted Rui Pinto in his chair, visibly taken aback by PJ’s testimony.
Rui Pinto is accused of 90 crimes for having accessed the computer systems and mailboxes of people linked to Sporting, Doyen, the PLMJ law firm, the Portuguese Football Federation, the Portuguese Bar Association and the PGR. Among those attacked are Jorge Jesus, Bruno de Carvalho, the then director of DCIAP Amadeu Guerra or the lawyer José Miguel Júdice. Thus, 68 are for improper access, 14 for violation of correspondence, six for illegitimate access, and also for computer sabotage of Sporting’s SAD and for attempted extortion of the Doyen investment fund.
Aníbal Pinto, his lawyer at the time of the alleged crimes, is responsible for the crime of attempted extortion. This is because, according to the investigation, Rui Pinto demanded a payment of between 500 thousand and one million euros from Doyen so that he would not publish documents related to the company that signs contracts with soccer clubs around the world. Aníbal Pinto, then the hacker’s lawyer, will have served as an intermediary. And that’s why they both sit next to each other, facing the panel of judges.
Rui Pinto. The boy with the “spiky hair” who was already on school computers before he was the “John” of Football Leaks
