The German Parliament has ruled that many more categories of hacking are an illegal act and should be punishable like any other crime. It is now an offense to create, sell, distribute or even acquire so called Hacker Tools in order to obtain illegal access to protected data. Another new offense is the unauthorized access of secured data by means that require the disabling or circumventing of security measures.

The legislation, which the German government proposed earlier last year and approved on Friday with no changes, seeks to crack down on the sharp rise in computer attacks in Germany's public and private sectors.

Although Germany, like the UK and the rest of Europe, already has computer crime legislation in place, the new law seeks to close more loopholes.

"Hacker attacks on IT systems are constantly evolving to the point where legislation drawn up several years ago cannot always cope with the more ingenious attack methodologies," said Yuval Ben-Itzhak, Finjan's CTO.

"Our quarterly web security trends report, for example, has identified the increasing use of code obfuscation (hiding) to avoid detection. This complex attack methodology is usually achieved using so-called hacker utilities, the possession of which was not illegal," said Yuval.

"The new legislation makes it illegal to acquire or download these utilities, as well as making it against the law to by-pass a system's IT security measures. This new German legislation is a significant step in making the Web more secure. However, Governments should also add rules to deter those who host malicious content on their servers, trying to infect others and steal their data," Yuval concluded.