British Teen Cleared in "E-mail Bomb" Case

legaleagll writes "According to this article , a British Judge has ruled that a teen who sent approximately 5,000,000 e-mails to his former employer was not in violation of the U.K.'s Computer Misuse Act. It appears that the Computer Misuse Act is a bit outdated being that it was created 15 years ago when a number, perhaps most, of the current methods for misuse of computers were not contemplated."

Comments

'editors' heh

[Neil Blender]

Summary says 3 million, the article clearly, even hyperlinked so it's highlighted, says 5 million.

Re:'editors' heh

[Tim C]

I thought it had been established long ago that the slashdot editors don't edit as such, they just approve and reject stories. No checking for factual accuracy, grammar, spelling, or any other things real editors would do is performed - it's even in the FAQ.

That said, that was fine when this was a hobbyist site; it's somewhat irksome now that it's a commercial venture. Not that I pay anything for it, other than the time spent frequenting and contributing of course...

Re:Time for a new server.

[Anonymous Coward]

And then it spawns more and more processes to process the mail, eating up ram, at which point any other services on the box may be overloaded and deprived of resources.

The default configuration of sendmail and many other common MTAs is to delay and stop accepting email to prevent exactly that.

Re:Sorry, but that's a pretty dumb comment...

[WIAKywbfatw]

Let's see, small 5-man company with basic ISDN (128Mbit/s) or ADSL (512Mbit/s)internet access used for everything including email, web access, etc that has no dedicated IT professional and whose business grinds to a halt because they can't do anything while their server is heavily attacked.

Don't assume that everyone has full-time IT professionals to hand. Also, don't assume that the messages were small: they could have been 10KB each, but they could easily have been 2MB each, 2,000 times larger than your guess.

Also remember that the crime in question took place at least two years ago, when internet access would have been slower, disk space would have been more expensive, etc, etc. The average business today has better resources now than would have been available then, at least from a bang-per-buck point of view, if nothing else.

Of course, if you're implementing IT strategy for a large corporation then DOS contingency planning will be part of your job description, but if you're running a small company, one where the guy who looks after the PCs is the same guy who puts out the rubbish at the end of the day, then DOS attacks probably won't be on your radar.