/spanp class="introduction"A 19-year-old Essex man has been charged with five computer offences, including attacking the Serious Organised Crime Agency's website./p pRyan Cleary, from Wickford, is alleged to have set up a distributed denial of service attack on Soca on 20 June./p pIt is alleged he attacked the website of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry in November 2010./p pHe also allegedly attacked the British Phonographic Industry's website in October. /p pMr Cleary was charged under the Criminal Law Act and Computer Misuse Act by the Met Police's e-crime unit and will appear at City of Westminster Magistrates court on Thursday. /p pA distributed denial of service typically involves flooding a target website with data, in an attempt to overwhelm it so it cannot serve its legitimate users. /p pThe charges against Mr Cleary include conspiring with other unknown people on or before 20 June to construct a botnet - a collection of hijacked home computers - to conduct distributed denial of service attacks./p pHe is also charged with making, adapting, supplying or offering to supply a botnet, intending that it should be used to commit, or to assist in the commission of a distributed denial of service attack./ppThis article is from the a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk" title="Link to BBC News"BBC News website/a. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/cCMPUV_QDDNR7pxmLZRMCsv5m0M/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/cCMPUV_QDDNR7pxmLZRMCsv5m0M/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/cCMPUV_QDDNR7pxmLZRMCsv5m0M/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/cCMPUV_QDDNR7pxmLZRMCsv5m0M/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/BbcNewsTechnologyFullFeed/~4/X24Wy5J3hDQ" height="1" width="1"/