November 1, 2006

Russian hackers can be tried in UK - judge

by Brian Turner

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Computers & Internet

A judge has ruled that a case involving a UK company’s servers being hacked from Russia can be tried in the UK.

The ruling comes over a bitter dispute after UK company Ashton claims its server in London were hacked in order to retreive sensitive commercial data on one of its client companies, Ansol.

Ashton claims Russian aluminiun company Ruscal and Tajikstan company, TadAZ, were behind the repeated server hackings.

Hack attempts were traced to a number of IP across Russia, including Ruscal’s own IP’s.

Ruscal claims a Wi-Fi system it operated at the time was insecure, and was therefore used by third-parties, rather than Ruscal employees.

While the case had yet to be brought to court, there has been a bitter dispute over legal jurisdiction.

However, Jonathan Hirst QC, sitting as a deputy judge of the High Court, ruled that as the servers were based in London, the legal jurisdiction was London, regardless as to where the data was sent to after.

This could be a very important case, because hacking and other illegal internet activity is flourishing in Eastern Europe and Russia.

While normally these illegal activities may not be seen as actionable, the ruling today means that if a UK company suffers hacking or other illegal damage to its IT infrastructure, there remains the possibility of bringing legal action in the UK.

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Story link: Russian hackers can be tried in UK - judge

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