The UK government has announced a set of guidelines to be applied to the Computer Misuse Act (part of the Police and Justice Act 2006) which will, if enforced, make it illegal to possess or distribute “hacking tools.”

The ban comes along with an increase in the maximum prison sentence available for computer-related offences to ten years and also a re-wording which makes denial of service attacks clearly illegal.

Many in the IT industry are grumbling about the ban, which would cover network tools such as Nmap and Wireshark if misused. The government has so far failed to allay these fears, stating only that the authors of such tools will only be chased if “they intended it to be used to commit computer crime” - no mention of what happens if a dual-use security tool is misused in such a way.

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UK, Government, Computer, Information Technology, IT, Guidelines, Usage, Misuse, Hacking, Spamming