The legal risks of ethical hacking - Network World - 0 views
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Karl Wabst on 27 Apr 09When ethical hackers track down computer criminals, do they risk prosecution themselves? Security researchers at this week's Usenix conference in Boston believe this is a danger, and that ethical hackers have to develop a uniform code of ethics for themselves before the federal government decides to take action on its own. One such researcher introduced himself by saying "Hi, I'm Dave Dittrich, and I'm a computer criminal." Dittrich, senior security engineer and researcher at the University of Washington's Information School, has not been unlucky enough to be prosecuted. But ten years ago, he took actions to disrupt distributed denial-of-service attacks which he says could have been construed as criminal, he says. Working within the University of Washington Network, Dittrich says he "copied files from one host in Canada that was caching malicious software and logs of compromised hosts," allowing him to gain a fuller understanding of the nascent distributed denial-of-service tools, and to inform the operators of infected Web sites that a problem existed.