COMPUTER SECURITY -- A PENETRATING ANALYSIS

The IPKat’s friend Gadi Oron reports: "In a decision delivered last week, the Jerusalem Magistrates’ Court cleared of all charges an Israeli accused of an attempt to penetrate the website of the Israeli secret service organisation Mossad. The Mossad website (http://www.mohr.gov.il) invites individuals who are interested in working with Mossad to fill in an online application form. According to the criminal charge filed against him, the accused tried unlawfully to penetrate the Mossad website but failed to do so. The accused maintained that his intention was solely to complete the online application form. However, he suspected that the site was not fully secure and, to remove any doubt, he sought to verify the level of security by a using simple and popular program that performs security failure checks. Noting that the Israeli Computers Act 1995 provide an unsatisfactory definition to the term ‘penetration of a computer’, the court distinguished between unlawful penetration and a mere attempt to verify the security level of a website. The latter, the court held, is not to be regarded as a criminal offence of unlawful penetration under the Israeli Computers Act if it is done independently and not as a preliminary stage before an actual harmful penetration. The accused was able to convince the court that he had no idea how to penetrate computers and no intention of penetrating the Mossad site. The fact that almost all of the prosecution evidence was made available to the prosecution by the generosity of the accused, who fully cooperated with his interrogators, supported his acquittal".

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