The government have today published the new Police and Justice Act, which makes it an offense to “supply or offer to supply any article believing that it is likely to be used to commit, or to assist in the commission of, [a hacking offence]“. The word “article” is defined in the Act to include “any program or data held in electronic form”.

Great! So now we have a system where criminal hackers will carry on producing and using ‘hacking’ software such as nmap, nessus or hping2 but it will be a criminal offense for security industry to use them to test for vulnerabilities.

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