Hackers attack Boris as Tories call for crackdown
HACKERS launched an attack on Conservative Party computer systems last week, even as they were touting proposals to get tough on computer crime.
David Davis, shadow home secretary told a conference last week that the Government hadn't done enough to tackle cybercrime.
He implied that hackers should be hit with tougher sentences and the statute should be armed with even more definitions of computer crime.
Meanwhile, hackers had broken into systems belonging to the campaign team for Boris Johnson, the Tory candidate for London Mayor, bringing them down for three hours.
Today's Torygraph reported the latest on the hack: "A senior member
of Mr Johnson's team said that its headquarters
in County Hall, London, was the target last week for hackers who broke through a
sophisticated computer firewall".
"'They brought the system down for three hours. The technicians said whoever did it was determined to get to us," the source told the paper.
Johnson had been complaining to the papers that his opponents in the Mayoral competition had been trying to smear him. The hack was just one of the ways in which Johnson had been hard done by.
But a spokesman for Johnson's campaign office said today that the reporter had got mixed up. It was merely the case that their network email had gone down and BT engineers were unable to find the source of the problem.
"We've no idea why [it happened]," he said.
Two years after the Police and Justice Act (2006) increased penalties for hacking in the UK to up to 10 years, Davis implied they should be made tougher still.
He proposed a "special team of prosecutors" to "look closely at the current approach to sentencing."
And he called for "new criminal offences to cover new types of
cybercrime - like botnets". Such crimes were also covered by the Police and
Justice Act last year.
Karen Todner, the lawyer representing Gary McKinnon against extradition charges for hobby hacking Pentagon computers, wasn't convinced any more tinkering with the law would help stop more hackers.
"The computer misuse act is pretty comprehensive and if it's applied properly there would be more prosecutions," she said.
Peter Sommer, professor of computer crime at the London School of Economics was also sceptical that getting more penal would help.
"You won't get the major players, you'll only get the incompetent
hackers or those down the food chain. Existing sentences are enough, the prisons
are bursting and people aren't much better when they come out".
He did, however, back the Davis' call for cybercrime to be taken more seriously by the government, which included reinstating the Hi-Tech Crime Unit that the Government subsumed into the Serious and Organised Crime Agency in 2006.
The Government has only just committed to ratify the international
Convention on Cybercrime, a
document
it signed in 2001. ยต
Share this:
ShareBusiness Intelligence Software
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Enterprise Accounting Software
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Enterprise Systems Management
Come on - the Inquirer should be IT literate enough to know the difference between hackers and crackers, and stop perpetuating the stupid mis-usage that folk in the big blue room use.

Flippin'eck.

AT adds: They're all scum who should be removed from the gene pool with extreme prejudice, as I have said many times before.
Tim, your complaint about using the wrong word to describe these cyber vandals seems silly to me. The term "hacker" has had various meanings in the last twenty years. Saying that there is some significant difference between "hacker" and "cracker" suggests a lack of knowledge about the history of these terms.

When I got into the business in 1985 the term "hacker" referred to someone who wrote sloppy, buggy code for software applications. By 1990 the term meant someone who spent all of their leisure time writing software as a hobby. Sometime in the early 1990s the term meant someone who broke into a computer system just to see if they could do it. By the late 1990s a hacker was considered to be a cyber vandal.

Also, some years ago a "cracker" was someone who found a way to activate software applications by sharing a valid software license. Later "crackers" found backdoor hacks to crack software activation procedures for applications.

As we all know, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. It doesn't make sense to complain about the proper usage of words whose meaning morphs every few years into something new. So, Tim, take a chill pill and relax. You'll feel better.
Andrew Thomas where ya been AT?