U.K. Outlaws Denial of Service Attacks 239
gnaremooz writes "A U.K. law has been passed that makes it an offense to launch denial-of-service attacks. The penalties for violating the new statues are stiff, with sentences increased from 5 to 10 years. The five year penalty was from the 1990 "Computer Misuse Act", which was enacted before the Internet became widespread. The idea of stiffer penalties for DoS attacks are probably something we can all get behind, but the language of the law is frustratingly vague." From the article: "Among the provisions of the Police and Justice Bill 2006, which gained Royal Assent on Wednesday, is a clause that makes it an offense to impair the operation of any computer system. Other clauses prohibit preventing or hindering access to a program or data held on a computer, or impairing the operation of any program or data held on a computer."
Jail Microsoft? (Score:4, Interesting)
Access Denied (Score:2, Interesting)
Full text of the act (Score:5, Interesting)
"Making, supplying or obtaining articles for use in offence under section 1 or 3
(1) A person is guilty of an offence if he makes, adapts, supplies or offers to supply any article--
(a) knowing that it is designed or adapted for use in the course of or in connection with an offence under section 1 or 3; or
(b) intending it to be used to commit, or to assist in the commission of, an offence under section 1 or 3."
I'm now a criminal. Joe Blackhat won't care; he'll still get hold of the 'articles', but now my website which tries to teach people about responsible use of such 'articles' now makes me liable for up to 2 years in jail, plus a fine. I hate the law.
Now I don't have to know what the tools will be used for, just that they can be used for wrongdoing.
Re:Hindering Access (Score:5, Interesting)
What is ''operation of data''? I don't think we had that in CS.
Well, on a unix-like system, the meaning is pretty obvious: Any file permissions other than 777 are now illegal. So to comply, you should run the following commands:
umask 0
find / | xargs chmor ugo+rwx
Also, in any programs that create files, you should change the permission arg to 0777.
Lessee, what have I forgotten?
(I suppose you should also turn off any firewall software you may have running, just to be on the safe side.)
Re:Another law (Score:1, Interesting)
No, just powerful. They can, and will, do as they please. Say goodbye to your beloved internet, they'll regulate it to death soon enough.
Re:Hindering Access (Score:4, Interesting)
Lets just hope you have a good lawyer who can put up a decent argument against a well versed set of 'anti-terror' lawyers, and prey that the judge you speak of owns an iPod. (you might want to hope you don't have the anarchists cookbook on your computer too).
But riddle me this Batman - if you submit a story to Slashdot about a new technology bill making denial of service attacks illegal, and the Governments site referenced in the article gets Slashdotted.... are you, by the new law, responsible?
Just who exactly is gonna get the heat? (Score:4, Interesting)
Who's gonna feel those 5-10 years? As much as I'd love it, it won't be the people dumb enough to not even notice that their connection is at crawling speed because they're infected. That would indeed be the end of the 'net, because people would be scared to go online.
So we're after the guy controling the botnet? HA! Good effing luck! Europol backed and "encouraged" by banks is trying to get a hand on the guys doing phishing trojans. I.e. European persecution organisations with some rather "encouraging" businesses behind them are in vain trying to crack down on some people doing essentially the same a DDOS controller would do.
So why do you think a DDOS blackmailer who's most likely targeting "smaller" companies (read: Normal companies that don't have the executive forces of states at their fingertips) would ever be found out?
In a nutshell, the law is pointless. Unenforceable. Yes, it's forbidden. Yes, it's against the law. Yes, people won't give a fu.., knowing that it's impossible to get caught.
Whether a law is broken does not primarily depend on the sentence tacked to it. It mainly depends on your chances of being caught. If that chance is zero, the sentence could be worse than death and people wouldn't care.