Denial of Service (DoS) attacks will be a criminal offence in Sweden. This legislation is in place for June 1st, 2007. Unfortunately, this legislation has become the target of jokes and ridicule. The humour falls on this part of the legislation:

“The new law will make it illegal to carry out a denial of service attack, regardless of whether it is done automatically or manually…”

link: Sweden to ban website attacks

Some people imagine hackers rounding up their friends and madly clicking away to take down a site manually.

Well, it is indeed possible to launch a DoS attack manually. - Having being the target of an incessant attack over at Spywareinfo, I tried to learn as much about these attacks as possible. It took us weeks (and considerable expense) to defend against the attacks. - The manual attack installs malicious codes onto vulnerable machines or sites to active an attack. I am told that some of these codes are extremely difficult to remove and many self propagate.

The people who worded this legislation in Sweden were correct and tried to be inclusive in naming this as a means of attack. Kudos to whomever worked on that legislation. It is wise not to underestimate the possible damage done by one malevolent hacker.

Catherine Forsythe
Director of Operations
FlyingHamster: http://flyinghamster.com/

[tags]hackers, security, DDoS, legislation, catherine forsythe[/tags]