New Legal Precedent Set In The UK

[GhostShip]

A new legal precedent has been set that could allow for those who generate DDos attacks to face jail time following a recent legal ruling, thus clearing up an area of the law that had yet to be tested.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21187632

Two men who carried out cyber attacks for the Anonymous hacking group have been jailed.
The two men carried out distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks which paralyse computer systems by flooding them with online requests.

The ones they attacked included payment site PayPal, costing it £3.5m.
The sentences were handed down at Southwark Crown Court and are thought to be the first convictions for DDoS in the UK.

It seems despite taking what they thought where hi-tech methods of hiding their identities they where tracked down easily and visited, a warning to others who use off the shelf sites and tools to mask their criminal activities.

[silicon_toad2000]

Kind of puts a dent in the Anonymous lobby to accept DDOS attacks as being a legitimate form of protest.

[..Ñøßߥ..]

Also rather ironic that the call themselved Anonymous yet don't have the skills to secure their own anonimity!

[Pri]

When anonymous was calling for people to DDoS with their modified IRC enabled LOIC software they told users not to use any kind of proxies or VPN services. Their reasoning was all it would accomplish would be attacking the relay server and not really affect the intended target of the attack.

Due to this "advice" many of these anti-social naive children ran the software without any protection at all. Their home lines and rented server IP Addresses were fully visible to those affected by the attacks and those logs were obviously handed over to the authorities.

From what I understand many of the people involved in the attack believed they would not get caught due to the attack having so many participants. And in previous years people who performed such attacks were seldom arrested for it. But the major difference here is they went after PayPal, Visa & Mastercard. All financial institutions and where there is money there is going to be repercussions.

Personally I think those involved in the attacks are incredibly stupid and they deserve to be caught for what they did and I hope it makes others think twice before getting involved in similar vigilante attacks.

[achilles]

I wonder how someone so naive to think that they could not be identified without using any means of proxy or IP spoofing could successfully operate the software to DDOS anyone. I guess hackers just keep making easier for any fool to help them achieve their end goal.  They were probably young, and had no grasp of what the consequences would be.

[Einsteinus]

You are just getting around to enacting laws that punish people for hacking into banks? Across the pong over here we were advised by Brian Williams of NBC news to use black electrical over your webcams so these hackers can't see what you are doing at home Last week he told everybody to disable the java script in the internet explorer. No doubt a percentage of the population went right to the Icon that says java and deleted it and everything like it in fear they were being cyber attacked.  Talk about a swiss cheese network waiting for some opportunity to be hacked by the big rat. the only way in the united states this hasent already (and of course it actually has that's how they now catch them) is that you get busted.  I thought interpole was on their game..Iv herd about a lot of doors getting busted down for way less in a number of euro countries.

[GhostShip]

Hacking into a bank is another type of crime, data protection legislation or simple fraud/theft will cover those types of crime, whats hard to legislate over for the English judiciary is why folks would want to do things for no clear reward, attempting to assign motives is an area fraught with legal danger so a safer ground is simply to turn such events into stealing or criminal damage labelled crime types, the reality is nothing was lost or stolen but folks where inconvenienced, that then is their real crime, being annoying.

[Bluey_412]

Ummmm, GS, if 'Being Annoying' was truly a crime, many, many, many of us would likely have incurred a criminal record at some time in our lives, altho there are those who would have racked up more than one or two counts

Mostly we call them Politicians...