Fergie's Tech Blog

UK: Teenage 'e-Mail Bomber' Heads Back to Court

David Meyer writes on C|Net News:

A teenager faces a retrial over charges that he breached British antihacking laws when he sent millions of messages to a former employer.

David Lennon, who is now 18 and can therefore be named for the first time, is alleged to have used an e-mail-bombing program called Avalanche to send approximately five million messages to his former employers, Domestic & General Group, in early 2004. The flood crashed the company's e-mail server.

The case against him, brought under the Computer Misuse Act, was dismissed in November by District Judge Kenneth Grant at Wimbledon Magistrates Court in London. At the time, Judge Grant said that Section 3 of the act, which concerns unauthorized modification of data, had not been breached, as e-mails sent to a server configured to receive e-mails could not be classified as unauthorized.

But on Thursday, judges at the Royal Courts of Justice in London sent the case back to the Magistrates Court, saying Judge Grant "was not right to state there was no case to answer."

posted by Fergie @ 5/11/2006 11:43:00 AM