Is vigilante hacking legal?

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://news.com.com/2100-1002-990469.html?tag=fd_top

By Robert Lemos 
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
February 27, 2003

SEATTLE -- Striking back at computers that are attacking a company or
home network could be legal under federal nuisance laws, a
technology-law expert said Thursday.

Curtis Karnow, attorney for law firm Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal, 
stressed during a speech at the Black Hat Security Briefings 
conference here that no court case has yet established precedent 
regarding the use of a limited counterstrike to stop Internet 
attackers, but that nuisance statutes appear to apply.

"It has a lot of promise...if we can get the court to look at it," 
Karnow said. "The law allows you to go in without permission and 
abate, or stop, the nuisance. You can even sue the malefactor for the 
expense of the abatement." 

Nuisance laws allow the state and private individuals to file lawsuits 
aimed at ending activities deemed harmful to a community. They have 
been used to close buildings that house drug dealers and to shut down 
businesses, such as quarries that create excessive dust in a 
neighborhood.

Karnow pointed to "self help" provisions that allow citizens to take 
action to mitigate an obvious nuisance as a way of dealing with 
intruders and so-called zombie servers. Under the law, the victim of 
an attack could conceivably shut down the offending program on the 
attacking server--even if the server belonged to someone else, he 
said. 

Karnow's solution could give hope to system administrators whose 
networks are under attack and who have found that petitioning law 
enforcement agencies is both slow and frequently ineffective. 

Administrators on the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) 
have for weeks discussed what to do about an estimated 20,000 servers 
still infected by the Slammer worm that continues to send an enormous 
amount of traffic though the Net. A similar number of computers are 
believed to be infected by the Code Red and Nimda worms and pose a 
threat to servers that haven't properly been patched.

However, Karnow warned that counterattacks would have to be used 
judiciously and only to a limited extent. 

"The real problem is collateral damage," he said. "Suppose you screw 
up--you hit the wrong machine (or) you shut down an entire computer 
rather than just a process. What happens if you are sued, not by a bad 
guy, but by an intermediary who was affected by your counterstrike?" 

Such issues should continue to deter anyone considering hacking back, 
he said. 

There are only a few known cases of defensive hacking. After the Code 
Red worm struck, a security expert created a tool that deleted the 
Code Red program and restarted the infected server.

The FBI pulled evidence from a Russian server without authorization 
after they successfully arrested two suspected Russian computer 
hackers in a sting operation. 

"It is a completely untested argument, but I think it is really worth 
exploring, because it has the notion of self help and allows 
aggressive action to abate the attack," he said. However, he warned 
anyone from trying to be "Version 1.0" in testing the law. 

"The judge who just learned how to use his cell phone is the person 
who is deciding on these technology issues," he said. "And this is 
beyond the bleeding edge of the law."




-
ISN is currently hosted by Attrition.org

To unsubscribe email majordomo () attrition org with 'unsubscribe isn'
in the BODY of the mail.