Last autumn I wrote a background paper on “Complexities in criminalising denial of service attacks” for the Internet Crime Forum (ICF) Legal subgroup. The idea was to give the lawyers some understanding of what DoS and DDoS attacks were all about, and how it can be hard to pin down concepts such as authorisation when one looks at how we use Internet resources today.

The Home Office has now brought forward the Police and Justice Bill, which contains amendments to Section 3 of the Computer Misuse Act 1990 to deal (they hope) with denial-of-service attacks. Thus events have overtaken the document – so there is little value in progressing the document through the ICF procedures needed to make it an Official Publication. Hence I’ve made it available on my own website, so as to provide a background resource to those considering whether the Home Office have got it right!