IF YOU guess the address of a company鈥檚 Web page when there are no links to it anywhere on their website, are you engaging in computer hacking? A Swedish company thinks so.
Software developer Intentia International of Stockholm last week filed a criminal complaint against news agency Reuters, after one of its reporters guessed a URL and accessed Intentia鈥檚 financial results before their scheduled release. Intentia alleges that the Reuters report on its financial performance resulted from hacking.
Reuters says the figures were public as soon as Intentia posted it to its Web server, whether there was a link or not. The reporter simply guessed the URL based on those of its previous quarterly reports, a Reuters spokeswoman says.
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Instead of being mounted on a staging server, where a Web page can be checked and kept before being posted to a public server, Intentia鈥檚 third-quarter report was placed on the public server ahead of time. The firm intended to 鈥渞elease鈥� it later by placing a link to it on its home page. The company has since improved security, an Intentia spokesman said.
While Reuters did not break any security measures such as password protection, anti-hacking laws guard so broadly against unauthorised access that they might not help its case. Intentia maintains that Reuters鈥� access was unauthorised.
But all documents on the Web are assumed to be public, says Lee Tien, staff attorney for San Francisco-based pressure group Electronic Frontier Foundation. 鈥淭his is no different than putting something in a flimsy wrapper on a street and hoping no one will notice it.鈥�