Hacking Crimes in Accordance with Decree No. 10 of the Year 2018 on Palestinian Cybercrimes

Abstract

This study dealt with the hacking crimes of computers and networks in accordance with article 4 of the law No. 10 for the year 2018 on cybercrimes. The Palestinian legislator stipulated that hacking crimes should be considered a planned action, as stated in the first paragraph of the text of Article 4. However, the researcher noted that there is ambiguity in this aspect in the third and fourth paragraph of the text of the said article. The crime of hacking as defined by the Palestinian legislator is illegal as it is done to delete copy or publish data and information in an unauthorized and illegal way. The Palestinian legislator did not consider that the process of deleting, copying and publishing data is an intentional action and must be treated as hacking. The researcher addressed hacking crimes in their simple and strict manners. When the perpetrator of such crime is fully aware of what he/she is doing and continues the hacking process of the system or the network, then, his/her action is considered a crime. While on the other hand, if the perpetrator of such crimes is not aware that he/she is hacking a system or a network, his/her action is not considered a crime because he/she did not continue what he/she is doing as  stated in the first paragraph of Article 4 of the new Palestinian law. In it, the legislator mentioned that the perpetrator of these crimes is aware and he/she knows that he/she is hacking the system. One of the findings that the researcher has reached is that a crime is committed when the user oversteps his/her specific clearance, or accesses others’ data, or exceeds the time allocated for access. This is all due to the work of the legislator, to draft a law that provides more security measures for protecting the systems, networks and data.