Thursday, November 3, 2005

Teen cleared of email bomb

A British teenager has been <A HREF="http://news.zdnet.com/British+teen+cleared+in+'e-mail+bomb'+case/2100-1009_22-5928471.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=zdnn">cleared of launching a denial-of-service attack</A> against his former employer, in a ruling that delivers another blow to the U.K's Computer Misuse Act. At Wimbledon Magistrates Court in London, District Judge Kenneth Grant ruled Wednesday that the teenager had not broken the CMA, under which he was charged. The defendant, who can't be named for legal reasons, was accused of sending 5 million email messages to his ex-employer that caused the company's email server to crash. The CMA, which was introduced in 1990, does not specifically include a denial-of-service attack as a criminal offense, something some members of the U.K. parliament want changed. However, it does explicitly outlaw the "unauthorized access" and "unauthorized modification" of computer material. Section 3 of the act, under which the defendant was charged, concerns unauthorized data modification and tampering with systems.

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