There had been concern that Britain's Computer Misuse Act,
written in the days before the World Wide Web, allowed denial of
service attacks to fall through a loophole. These are attacks in
which a web or email server is deliberately flooded with
information to the point of collapse.
The 1990 legislation described an offence of doing anything with
criminal intent "which causes an unauthorised modification of the
contents of any computer"; the question was whether that covered
denial of service attacks. When a court cleared teenager David
Lennon in November 2005 on charges of sending five million emails
to his former employer – because the judge decided that no offence
had been committed under the Act – the need for amendment seemed
obvious.
Lennon's lawyer had successfully argued that the purpose of the
company's server was to receive emails, and therefore the company
had consented to the receipt of emails and their consequent
modifications in data. District Judge Kenneth Grant concluded that
sending emails is an authorised act and that Lennon had no case to
answer, so no trial took place. That ruling was overturned and
Lennon was sentenced to two months' curfew with an electronic tag.
But by that time, amendments to the 1990 legislation were already
included in the Police and Justice bill.
It was passed yesterday, becoming the Police And Justice Act
2006. It has still to be brought into force. The Act also increases
the penalty for unauthorised access to computer material from a
maximum of six months' imprisonment to two years.
The 2006 Act expands the 1990 Act's provisions on unauthorised
modification of computer material to criminalise someone who does
an unauthorised act in relation to a computer with "the requisite
intent" and "the requisite knowledge."
The requisite intent is an intent to do the act in question and
by so doing:
- to impair the operation of any computer,
- to prevent or hinder access to any program or data held in any
computer, or
- to impair the operation of any program or data held in any
computer.
The intent need not be directed at any particular computer or
any particular program or data.
The wording is wide enough that paying someone else to launch an
attack will still be a crime, with a maximum penalty of 10 years in
prison. Supplying the software tools to launch an attack or
offering access to a botnet could be punished with up to two years
in prison.
