NZ Police lay first charge for hacking

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,2845353a6022,00.html

15 March 2004  
By RICHARD WOOD

Police have laid the first charges for hacking under the controversial
Crimes Amendment (No 6) Act, which was passed in mid-2003 and carries
severe penalties for computer crime.

Electronic crime lab national manager Martin Kleintjes says the
charges relate to alleged damage caused to a website and the computer
systems of a company in Maryland in the United States.

He declines to name the firm.

The accused man appeared in Dunedin District Court on Thursday morning
and was granted name suppression.

He entered no plea and was remanded on bail till March 18.

Mr Kleintjes says all the charges laid are under the Crimes Amendment
(No 6) Act.

One charge is for damaging or interfering with a computer system,
albeit not in a way that would endanger life - an offence which
carries a maximum seven-year jail term.

Another charge is for accessing a computer system without
authorisation, which can result in imprisonment for up to two years.

New Zealand police were alerted to the alleged crime by counterparts
in the United States through a network of e-crime fighters that is
made up of representatives from the G8 group of countries.

Mr Kleintjes says it has been a complex case but the e-crime unit has
received very good co-operation internationally.

The Crimes Amendment (No 6) Act created specific computer-related
offences and took four years to make it through parliament.

Before the act was passed hackers could be charged only under general
legislation, such as that which deals with theft and criminal damage.

The Green Party and some commentators spoke out against the
anti-hacking legislation, arguing there was no need for a specific
anti-hacking law, that people should need to show malicious intent in
order to commit a crime, and that the potential penalties were too
harsh.

Cross-border prosecutions for hacking remain relatively rare.

Last month a British teenager was sentenced to 200 hours community
service for hacking into the computer system of a US physics research
laboratory which carried out research into subatomic particles and
nuclear weapons in order to store his collection of music and film
files on the laboratory's computers.

Electronic Crime Lab staffer Simon Welborn recently told a seminar in
Wellington that the unit was getting a growing number of requests for
support from its counterparts overseas to help track down New
Zealanders involved in cross-border crimes relating to e-commerce.

The unit isn't paid for such work by overseas agencies and has flagged
its resources are being stretched by a growing workload.

Most of the work of the Police's Electronic Crime Lab concerns
"traditional" rather than electronic crime, and includes gathering
evidence held on hard disks and stored in e-mails.



-
ISN is currently hosted by Attrition.org

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