I thought this was interesting. The attitude seems to be that they are unwilling to prosecute unless it can be used to enhance careers or someone with money and/or influence was involved. -----Forwarded Message----- From: Declan McCullagh <declan@private> To: politech@private Subject: [Politech] Does Justice Department prosecute denial of service attacks? Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2003 01:59:20 -0400 --- Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2003 22:33:51 -0700 (PDT) From: Bob Kirkpatrick <bobk@private> To: Declan McCullagh <declan@private> Subject: Re: [Politech] Monkeys.com anti-spam blacklist shuttered by online attack [sp] In-Reply-To: <6.0.0.22.2.20030926003711.02239cd0@private> Hi Declan: Working with an ISP that uses our consulting services, they came under DoS attack and had their operations significantly hapmpered for two days before a successful defense was built. With effort and cooperation from a number of ISPs, the perpetrator was tracked down and identified. The hacker's ISP provided complete monitoring and logs that, when matched to our customers logs confirmed the guilt. All of the investigation done, they contacted the FBI. Agents came and interviewed everyone -including the 17 year old perpetrator and concluded that the guy had committed a series of felonies. The US Attorney refused to prosecute the case, and sent policy through the apologetic Agent, that only cases that involved physical harm to a being or physical harm of equipment valued at $25,000 or greater. All others would not be prosecuted, and since a loss of service, damage to customers, and the collateral damages to an ISP did not constitute damages sufficient to meet the standard. The only charge available under Ohio law was Violation of Privacy, a misdemeanor with an extremely low fine. The hacker was never prosecuted. I suspect that with the current attitudes of law enforcement towards electronic crimes, that it's pretty much open season for the black hats. _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/) -- alan at clueserver.org - alan at ctrl-alt-del.com "...new-fangled and artificial treasons have been the great engines by which violent factions, the natural offspring of free government, have usually wreaked their alternate malignity on each other...." - James Madison in The Federalist No. 43,
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