The last week has been a most interesting one from a moral and legal point of view.

On 29 October, SecurePoint lost its anti-virus vendor H+BEDV after employing Sven J., the author of the Netsky and Sasser viruses which have been causing havoc since March this year. Within the anti-virus industry, there is the unwritten rule that no bonafide anti-virus company will employ a (former) virus writer. Although SecurePoint does not make its own anti-virus product, Norman supports the action taken by our competitor to discontinue its collaboration with this company. It makes it easier for the industry to defend against the pessimists that claim that anti-virus vendors ‘create their own market’. See: http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/52731   

On November 1st, the Dutch Justice Department found the person that issued DDoS attacks against several governmental websites in October, which caused the websites to be unreachable for 4 days. As a result of the attack, the Dutch government has decided to increase the penalties for breaking into someone else’s computer. If the law is accepted, the offender will face a penalty of one year in jail. If the offender also steals information, the penalty can be increased to four years imprisonment. Also sending data to a computer system to interfere with the operations of the system will be punishable by a year’s imprisonment. This can include serious attacks of spam or unsolicited e-mails.

On 4 November, Jeremy Jaynes of Raleigh, VA in the USA, was found guilty of exceeding the limits on the number of e-mails marketers can send in a given time period, and sentenced to 9 years imprisonment. Jaynes’ sister, Jessica DeGroot, was also found guilty and fined 7,500 dollars. When he was arrested last December, Jeremy Jaynes, who used the alias “Gaven Stubberfield", was ranked the eighth-most prolific spammer in the world by the watchdog group The Spamhaus Project.

Now the FBI is actively seeking Saad Echouafni, who is wanted on computer intrusion charges in California where he allegedly hired computer hackers to launch attacks against his company’s competitors. See: http://www.fbi.gov/mostwant/alert/echouafni.htm

Looking at all the legal actions taken in the last week, it seems that governments finally start to see computer crimes as serious offenses.

Righard J. Zwienenberg