Finjan Welcomes New Anti-hacking Legislation

Published 1st June 2007

Farnborough, United Kingdom, May 30, 2007 – Finjan, a leader in web security products, has welcomed the German Parliament's decision to rule many more categories of hacking as an illegal act and to be punishable like any other crime.

The legislation, which the German government proposed earlier last year and approved on Friday with no changes, seeks to crack down on the sharp rise in computer attacks in Germany's public and private sectors.

Although Germany, like the UK and the rest of Europe, already has computer crime legislation in place, the new law seeks to close more loopholes.

"Hacker attacks on IT systems are constantly evolving to the point where legislation drawn up several years ago cannot always cope with the more ingenious attack methodologies," said Yuval Ben-Itzhak, Finjan's CTO.

"Our quarterly web security trends report, for example, has identified the increasing use of code obfuscation (hiding) to avoid detection. This complex attack methodology is usually achieved using so-called hacker utilities, the possession of which was not illegal," said Yuval.

"The new legislation makes it illegal to acquire or download these utilities, as well as making it against the law to by-pass a system's IT security measures. This new German legislation is a significant step in making the Web more secure. However, Governments should also add rules to deter those who host malicious content on their servers, trying to infect others and steal their data," Yuval concluded.

For more on the new Germany's anti-hacking legislation:
http://www.heise-security.co.uk/news/90255

For more on Finjan: http://www.finjan.com

Company Profiles powered by ITReseller.com