Lawyers Call For Action Following DoS Ruling

by Robin Pilgrim, LawAndTax-News.com, London

10 November 2005

Concerns have been expressed by the UK's legal community this week regarding a ruling which stated that a teenager who bombarded his ex-employer with several million e-mails (known as a denial-of-service attack) had not committed a crime under the Computer Misuse Act.

Ruling in Wimbledon's Magistrates Court, District Judge Kenneth Grant stated that the youth - who has not been named due to his age - had not broken the CMA.

The Act, introduced fifteen years ago, makes the 'unauthorised access' and 'unauthorised modification' of computer material illegal. Section 3, under which the teenager was charged, concerns unauthorised data modification and tampering with systems.

The counsel for the defence argued that sending unsolicited emails did not represent unauthorised access or modification, as the email server's sole purpose was to receive emails.

Acknowledging that "the computer world has considerably changed since the 1990 Act", and that consequently there is little legal precedent in this area, Judge Grant ruled that the DoS attack was not illegal under the CMA.

In the wake of the ruling, the legal community has called for the CMA to be updated to take into account technological developments.

Speaking to the IT Week news service, lawyer George Gardiner warned that:

"Hackers can [now] do what they want until this judgement is [reversed] or the act modified."

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