Fighting malware and spam

UK toughens law against DoS, tools

New law ups penalties for hacking, but could threaten security research.

The UK 'Police and Justice Bill 2006', introduced into UK law this month, has drawn some approval for its efforts to refine the definitions of computer abuse to ensure Denial of Service attacks are covered, and for upping the potential penalty for hacking attacks from five to ten years. However, law watchers have warned that other clauses in the law could impinge on the development and use of tools useful to security testers and researchers as well as hackers.

The new bill contains several amendments to the current UK computer legislation, the Computer Misuse Act 1990. Among these, the most well-received new clauses broaden the scope of the law to cover all forms of computer attack, including any form of 'unauthorised act' and attacks on any computer, program, data or any kind of program or data, intended to impair or hinder access to that computer, program, data or type of program or data. Possible sentences for such crimes are also extended.

The section which has drawn criticism is a new clause entitled 'Making, supplying or obtaining articles for use in computer misuse offences', which is clearly intended to cover the creation and use of any tool designed for use in computer attacks, be it a virus, a trojan, a rootkit, an exploit or a hacker tool of any sort. However, by its broadness the new clause could affect the use of many valuable utilities and techniques used in security and malware research.

'Rights groups have pointed out that the law has no provision covering tools such as nmap, ethereal or password crackers being used for legitimate ends,' said John Hawes, Technical Consultant at Virus Bulletin. 'The wording of the act prohibits the creation, adaptation or use of any tool which could be used to breach security, whether the developer or user intends it to be or only believes it is likely to be. Some commentators have suggested that this could be taken to outlaw the use of web browsers, as a poorly protected machine could be accessed without the need for more devious software. Let's hope the law will be fixed, or at least applied in an intelligent way.'

The text of the computer-related sections of the new act is available from a UK government website, here. A summary and some analysis can be seen at the Open Rights Group wiki, here, with further commentary at zdnet, here. The full Computer Misuse Act 1990 is available online here.

20 November 2006

Tags: virus