Germany Adopts ‘Anti-Hacker’ Law

Germany has just passed a new law that adds more anti-hacker provisions to the German criminal code. Although the new rules are meant to apply narrowly to hacking, critics are already complaining that they may prevent necessary security and network research. The new rules tighten up the existing sanctions and prohibit any unauthorised user from disabling or circumventing computer security measures to access secure data. Manufacturing, programming, installing or spreading software that has the primary goal of circumventing security measures is verboten, which means that some security scanning tools might become illegal. In theory, this applies only to illicit programs like trojans, but some groups worry about how the new criteria will be applied