U.K. Outlaws Denial of Service Attacks

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."

Comments

Full text of the act

[user24]

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/ cmbills/119/2006119.htm

"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

[jc42]

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

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.)