There's no end to the ingenuity of hackers, thieves, rogue marketers, spies, pranksters and other malicious persons when it comes to interfering with your communications systems and equipment, stealing or messing up their contents or just invading your privacy. And there has never been serious doubt that these activities are, or should be, criminalised.

The main weapon in the fight against these sorts of crimes has been the good old Computer Misuse Act of 1990. The amazing thing is that in an era of unprecedented technical innovation it has worked as well as it has done to criminalise activities that its draftsmen could not possibly have envisaged in the late 1980's. Nevertheless it had become seriously out of date. This was highlighted in 2005 with the initial acquittal of David Lennon after he sent millions of emails to an ex-employer - the Act did not clearly protect against denial of service attacks.

Via the Police and Justice Act 2006 we now have an improved Computer Misuse Act, with more widely-drawn offences and tougher penalties, due to be brought into force in early 2007. The new section 3(1) changes the old offence of causing 'unauthorised modifications to the contents of any computer' to 'unauthorised acts with intent to impair, or with recklessness to unauthorised act in relation to a computer', which ensures that denial of services acts are caught. Furthermore it is now an offence to 'make, supply or obtain articles for use' in the section 1 and 2 offences – this would catch those who make or sell gizmos or widgets which are used for these purposes – such as a device for installing spyware on somebody else's mobile phone.

November 2006 delivered another exciting new offence – the new Fraud Act 2006 declares at section 2(5) that 'For the purposes of this section a representation may be regarded as made if it (or anything implying it) is submitted in any form to any system or device designed to receive, convey or respond to communications (with or without human intervention)' – so installing rogue devices or software could also amount to fraud by false representation, for which the penalty is up to 10 years.