UK Bans Denial of Service Attacks

["Fergie" <fergdawg () netzero net>]

_This_ should really make DoS attacks go away... not! :-)

In all seriousness, it _should_ prove useful in at least the
prosecutorial sense.

Via OUT-LAW.com.

[snip]

A law was passed yesterday that makes it an offence to launch a denial
of service attack in the UK, punishable by up to ten years in prison.

There had been concern that Britain's Computer Misuse Act, written in
the days before the World Wide Web, allowed denial of service attacks
to fall through a loophole. These are attacks in which a web or email
server is deliberately flooded with information to the point of collapse.

The 1990 legislation described an offence of doing anything with
criminal intent "which causes an unauthorised modification of the
contents of any computer"; the question was whether that covered denial
of service attacks. When a court cleared teenager David Lennon in
November 2005 on charges of sending five million emails to his former
employer – because the judge decided that no offence had been committed
under the Act – the need for amendment seemed obvious.

[snip]

More:
http://www.out-law.com/default.aspx?page=7462


- ferg

--
"Fergie", a.k.a. Paul Ferguson
 Engineering Architecture for the Internet
 fergdawg(at)netzero.net
 ferg's tech blog: http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/


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