This may be a bit off topic, but here goes, The passing of this Bill has been likened to a knee jerk reaction on the governments part, and will greatly influence how security engineers in Australia go about their business. http://australianit.news.com.au/common/storyPage/0,3811,2944524%5E442,00.htm l Sorry about the size of the quote, but this is an extract from the explanatory memoranda for the new bill... This offence is designed to cover persons who possess programs or technology designed to hack into other peoples computer systems or impair data or electronic communication. For example, a person will commit the offence if the person possesses a program which will enable him or her to launch a denial of service attack against a Commonwealth Departments computer system and intends to use the program for that purpose. It would also be an offence for a person to possess a disk containing a computer virus that the person intends to release over the Internet in order to impair data in infected computers. In both instances, the person would also commit the offence if he or she intends to provide the program to another person for the purpose of enabling the other person to impair electronic communication or computer data. There will be many occasions where that intention will be evident from the content of the data. There is no requirements or set conditions which must be met in order for a prosecuting body to determine how 'intent' is to be determined which means that it could be extremely hard to defend yourself if there is a motive (regardless of whether or not you would actually carry it out). Regards Luke ------------------------------------------------------------ This e-mail may be confidential. Any opinions expressed herein are the opinion of the writer unless there is an express indication to the contrary. If you are not the intended recipient of this communication please delete and destroy all copies and immediately reply by return e-mail. Ipex ITG disclaims all liability and responsibility for any direct or indirect loss arising from this e-mail and/or any attachments. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- This list is provided by the SecurityFocus Security Intelligence Alert (SIA) Service. For more information on SecurityFocus' SIA service which automatically alerts you to the latest security vulnerabilities please see: https://alerts.securityfocus.com/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Thu Sep 27 2001 - 10:11:02 PDT