Denial of service attacks will become illegal in Sweden from 1st June this year. This move by the Swedish government follows several well-publicized incidents in 2006 when government and police websites were brought down by DoS attacks. These incidents highlighted a lack of up-to-date legislation that would be sufficient to support successful legal action in such cases.
Up until now Sweden had no laws that specifically addressed DoS attacks, but a new draft amendment to hacking laws proposed by the government this week would punish such offences by a maximum of 2 years in jail. The new law would make it an offence to carry out a denial of service attack regardless whether it was done manually or automatically, even though manual attacks are currently something of a rarity. However, it also would require prosecutors to demonstrate that the attack was actually intended to disable its victim machine or network.
It will remain to be seen if these new DoS-specific laws would greatly improve the current situation in Sweden regarding computer attacks, particularly with the inclusion of the requirement to demonstrate specific intent to disable a system. Last summer’s incidents with the government and police sites have gone unpunished because the authorities could not prove who the perpetrators were, even though there was speculation that these attacks were related to raids on prominent pirate exchange site The Pirate Bay. At the same time, making DoS attacks a specific crime should certainly prove to be a better deterrent than the current legal void that exists in Swedish legislation.
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