Nmap Announce mailing list archives
publicly available resources and the law
From: HD Moore <hdmoore () usa net>
Date: Tue, 23 Feb 1999 02:17:59 -0600
Daemor wrote:
Communicate with? Retrieve data from? Who authorizes me to connect to port 80 at www.nsa.gov? No one, it is made publicly available. No authorazation is required to access the data. Port scanning simply asks which services are offered by a computer. Unless measures have been taken to restrict access to the data and the individual has attempted to circumvent those measures then I see no crime. Being charged with a misdemeanor simply for port scanning ALONE seems a bit rediculous to me. I realize that scanning a host is often followed by an attack on a system or is part of a search for vulnerable systems but simply asking if the information is publicly available should not be a crime.
Along these lines, I was wondering what the legal status of accessing FTP servers with anonmyous logins, wide open NFS exports, or NetBIOS shares. There needs to be some clarification of what is considered public access and what is simply misconfiguration. Anyone have something to contribute about what is actually legal to access and what is invasion? Is any resource that can be accessed without special authorization considered public access in the terms of the law?
Current thread:
- publicly available resources and the law HD Moore (Feb 23)
- Re: publicly available resources and the law Technical Incursion Countermeasures (Feb 23)
- RE: publicly available resources and the law Frank Miller (Feb 23)
- Re: publicly available resources and the law Bennett Todd (Feb 23)
- Re: publicly available resources and the law Lamont Granquist (Feb 23)
- RE: legality of port-mapping Dragos Ruiu (Feb 23)
- RE: legality of port-mapping Lamont Granquist (Feb 24)
- Re: publicly available resources and the law Daemor (Feb 23)
- Re: publicly available resources and the law Technical Incursion Countermeasures (Feb 23)
- RE: publicly available resources and the law Frank Miller (Feb 23)
- RE: publicly available resources and the law Erik Parker (Feb 23)
- RE: publicly available resources and the law Dragos Ruiu (Feb 23)