DoS attack legalities

Anonymouse

So a forum I'm the mod of seems to have been getting DoS attacked lately. Anyone know of the legalities behind this? Is it illegal? We have the address of where it came from and looks like other staff know who it was from. Help? I know a lot of things pertaining to the internet are kind of a grey area in terms of law enforcement.

JavonR

From what I have seen/heard, forming a legal case is extremely expensive when you are dealing with DoS attacks. You could probably count the number of people convicted world wide on 1 hand. I might be wrong about this, as its just what I've heard from others

Paul Boz

It depends on how the server that the forums are on is hosted. If you host it yourself just put an ACL on the router between the server and the internet to block the IP. If it is a hosted box contact the host about possibly filtering out the attack through access controls.

I can't condone revenge but I can assure you that if I was in your shoes the attacker would get it much worse

brad-

Anonymouse wrote: »

So a forum I'm the mod of seems to have been getting DoS attacked lately. Anyone know of the legalities behind this? Is it illegal? We have the address of where it came from and looks like other staff know who it was from. Help? I know a lot of things pertaining to the internet are kind of a grey area in terms of law enforcement.

I think all you should want to do is defend against it and move on. I seriously doubt you have the time or money, or proper evidence to litigate.

tiersten

It isn't legal. However as others have pointed out, it is very difficult to actually get the originator brought to justice via the courts.

The best you can probably do is look up the IP address of the source and see if you can contact their ISPs abuse department and get them shutdown.

You can't even be sure that the source that you've identified is actually the real source. There are so many open proxies and compromised machines out there that it is extremely easy to mask the real source.