Personal Opinion by Allan Dyer
Anyone who runs a firewall, or personal firewall software, will be familiar with port scanning: crackers using programs to attempt to connect to many services on a computer, or a service on many computers. We can compare this to a criminal who walks down a line of parked cars, trying every door-handle – he’s looking for one that is open and can be robbed. The problem on the Internet is, even though legislation in many countries makes unauthorized access to a computer a crime, attempting to connect and failing, or “casing the joint” is not. We see the firewall logs where he fails, but we do not see where he succeeds. Even though the attempts are failing, a cleverer cracker can use the sheer volume of the log files to try to hide the successful attacks.
I think it would be useful to make port and host scanning a minor crime, so that the perpetrator’s computer can be searched for further evidence, and so that the Police can use their discretion to impress on “script-kiddies”, and their parents, that they are doing something wrong before they get too deeply involved. Unfortunately, the Government Interdepartmental Report on Computer Related Crime did not address this. I would be interested to hear of attempts to address this in other jurisdictions, or opinion on if it could work.