By Will Sturgeon, 11 March 2005 17:20
NEWS The UK All Party Internet Group (APIG) is calling on the government to raise the penalties for crimes under the Computer Misuse Act with a motion planned by chairman and Labour MP for Sittingbourne Derek Wyatt.
APIG wants to see amendments made to the Computer Misuse Act (1990) (CMA) to incorporate the relatively recent crime of denial-of-service attacks. It also wants to the raise the severity of punishments under the CMA section one, which relates to hacking offences, from six months to two years.
Such a hike in sentences would make the offence an extraditable one and bring it into line with the European Convention on Cybercrime.
Wyatt will invoke his right to a 10 minute Rule Bill. Such an act entitles Wyatt to make a 10-minute speech to the House of Commons introducing the Bill which places the recommendation on record.
A statement from Wyatt on his website said: "The All Party Group was hoping that an MP would have picked this up as part of the Private Members' allocation for bills but sadly no-one did so it seemed sensible given the work we undertook last year to at least place on record what we think the Bill should look like in the hope that the Government will come back to it after the General Election."
The motion to move the Bill is scheduled for 5 April. After this, in order to become law, the Bill will have to pass first reading, second reading, committee stage, report stage, third reading and the House of Lords.
Denial-of-service attacks have become a popular and powerful weapon in the online arsenal of organised crime groups. At its most basic a DoS attack will cripple a website or server with constant requests, creating a flood of traffic which it is unable to cope with.
Last year a number of UK bookmakers were targeted with extortion scams which threatened to cripple their websites ahead of major sporting fixtures if a ransom wasn't paid.
Comments
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1. sam
Unless British Parliament have never really heard of computers i think they're very stupid. DoS-ing has NOTHING in relation to hacking. I am a boy about to turn 14 and so far i have built computers, fixed computers, setup computers, install software including operating systems such as Windows and Linux and DoS is nothing but a program to execute other files. Windows has not had a proper DoS program since 3.1 which only had compatability with probably 14.4kbit/s modems. It is highly improbable you can get hacked like this. Plus Microsoft wouldn't bundle software you can use to hack other Microsoft consumers with would they? Sure, they have enough money for eternity but it's nice to have more.
2. anonymous
Sorry young Sam, you seem to have missed the point a tad.
you are confusing DOS (Disk Operating System) and (D)DOS which is (Distributed) Denial Of Service attack. The two have nothing in common except sharing the same acronym.
I'd suggest a quick read up on denial of service attacks rather than us go into it here :-)
And remember, stay away from the darkside, don't become another script kiddie.