Internet security law and legislation

Ever since the Internet was established, the stories were distributed about certain kids gaining unauthorized access to several government computers causing all kind of mayhem. The movie “War Games” turned the hacker into a romantic figure. Many movies were made related to this topic, most notable “Hackers”, “Sneakers” and even “Matrix”, where main characters were given names of notable hackers from the scene. But the government found no humour or understanding for these sometimes very misguided people, harsh punishment ensued whenever such a law breaker was captured.
But such an intrusion is the least of all Internet security breaches, more common are other forms of activity, such as Nuking, port scanning, DOS attacks, sniffing, spoofing, key logging, spamming, phishing, creation of viruses, Trojan horses, worms, malware and other annoying, destructive and illegal actions.
The legislation constantly tries to improve the juristic definitions and the law to meet the constantly developing and changing malicious behaviour of such culprits, even employs some of the previously best hackers and exploiters as their consultants. Various agencies have their own department for fighting the cyber crime, most notably the Homeland Security’s National Cyber Security Division, which actually serves to protect the United States against Internet terrorism and Net based attacks.
The government regulations are very extensive, most prominent is the Federal Information Security Management Act, a part of the 2002 Homeland Security Act, requiring certain security standards of government agencies and accessible networks. In 2003, the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace engaged the Department of Homeland Security to research and recommend nationwide solutions for security issues. In 2004, the Congress funded the Strategy with $ 4.7 billion, showing just how serious this approach was intended to be.
The government is furthermore very engaged into enticing businesses handling sensitive consumer data and data subject to privacy regulations to improve cyber security and make sure that such files cannot be accessed by unauthorized persons. In addition, Congress is evaluating several bills which will render cyber attacks criminal, and define punishment for any such acts. Furthermore, the end user is increasingly encouraged to improve local security measures by employing firewalls, virus scanners, hacker prevention and blocking systems, encryption of sensitive data and using less vulnerable browsers. Internet Service Providers worldwide have very vague impositions on how extensive such security measures have to be, definitions like “reasonable” and in the new legislature “prevent unauthorized activity” as well as “mitigate potential harm to individuals” leave very much room to interpretation on just how rigorous such security measures should be. No technically distinctive and clearly defined regulations exist to date.