Australian law ill-equipped forCyber crime

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Cyber crime leaving the law floundering

By LINDA MORRIS SYDNEY Monday 3 April 2000

Australian law enforcement agencies are ill-equipped to investigate cyber criminals because governments have been slow to pass laws covering the Internet, some of the country's leading crime experts claim.

"We are ill-prepared and going backwards," one said.

The former chairman of the National Crime Authority, Mr John Broome, told a recent anti-crime conference Australian business was vulnerable to so-called transnational crime crossing borders via computers.

Yet the deliberate jamming of commercial Web sites was not illegal under federal law. Legislation to deal with attacks on computer data was possibly years away.

The criticism comes as high-profile sites in the United States, including Amazon, Yahoo! and CNN, have been crippled in a wave of attacks in which hackers use software to bombard a Web site with bogus requests for information, jamming it for hours.

The Australian Federal Police is investigating an attack on a Sydney business believed to be related to the US hacker attacks.

At the conference Dr Peter Grabosky, director of research at the Australian Institute of Criminology, said the loss of police forensic computer specialists to more lucrative private sector made it difficult for law enforcement agencies to combat computer crime.

He said the task was further complicated because some crimes went undetected and, in other cases, companies concealed the crime because of commercial embarrassment.

More than 3.2 million Australian households have access to the Internet. It is estimated that worldwide 900 million people will be using the Internet by the end of this year.

Mr Broome said: "It is a very real possibility, indeed, that companies, faced with the threat of catastrophic disruption to their business, may well succumb to extortion in circumstances which will be much more difficult to investigate than recent examples of product contamination. "We are ill-prepared and going backwards."

Two weeks ago, the president of the International Association of Police Chiefs, Mr Michael Robinson, told a conference of police commissioners that law enforcement did not have the expertise to keep up with cyber criminals, and outdated laws based on territory made it difficult to prosecute.

Police commissioners from Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Papua New Guinea have agreed to set up a committee to evaluate their capacity to deal with electronic crime.

Australia's criminal code is being revised. The Minister for Justice, Senator Amanda Vanstone, last month released a draft code for discussion.

Mr Broome said the code tried to protect data and programs from corruption and unauthorised access. But the laws were unlikely to be introduced in the life of this Parliament.

Mr Broome, who was chairman of the NCA from 1996 until last year, is now an adviser to the Control Risks Group, an international consultancy specialising in investigating corporate kidnappings and product extortion.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/20000403/A45365-2000Apr2.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), April 02, 2000


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