Is is illegal to hack websites in a country considered to be an enemy of my country? I know that Hacking is illegal in any country. my question is this "is it illegal to hack enemy country website ?" e.g i lived in Pakistan, let say i hacked Indian Govt websites. is this illegal ? if this is illegal what will be fine and prison charge?
This question really depends on the specific countries involved, as all law depends on jurisdiction. However, there are essentially two ways that breaking into foreign computer systems could be illegal: 1) Your own country has laws against hacking that include hacking into foreign computers or 2) The country you're breaking into has laws about hacking that are not limited to citizens. In the first case, your own country would find such "hacking" illegal; in the second, your target country would find such "hacking" illegal. If you violate the first, which is the less likely option, you could be traced, located and prosecuted by your own country. If you violate the second, which is the more likely option, the target country would target you for extradition and prosecution. Depending on the amount of political power your target country has, this could result in you being shipped off to another country to face their courts, without the protection of your own country. In other words, it could very well be illegal, though the specific sentence resulting from such a crime is far too specific to even attempt to address in the general case.
Generally speaking, you are only linking to other resources on the web, and generally that's not illegal. But that could be different depending on the country that hosts the site and the country of the user's access. This site seems to have no problem: http://thehiddenwiki.org/hidden-wiki/ Read their TOS, too: http://thehiddenwiki.org/2013/06/26/terms-of-service-and-privacy-policy/ That site is hosted in Romania (the domain is privately registered in Malaysia), but Germany and Romania are both EU. Now, what users may use those links for may be illegal. And that's still in legal flux in some jurisdictions, i.e. the hosting of a site of BitTorrent links that allow downloading of copyrighted material while the link itself does not contain the material themselves. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_issues_with_BitTorrent Besides, a list of .onion links on the regular web is useless unless you know how to use the links; you're linking to resources on the &quot;dark&quot; that are not even directly accessible from those links on the &quot;bright&quot; web. Someone who wants to go to an .onion link needs to install Tor https://www.torproject.org/ to enable the DNS changes to access the .onion TLD (Top Level Domain). .onion is not even in the Internet's Root Domain; it's a special case TLD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.onion Installing and using TOR is one more step that someone has to take to make use of a link in the &quot;bright&quot; web to reach a link in the &quot;dark&quot; web. So your links are &quot;isolated&quot; in one more sense from usefullness, and that could be a legal defense, if it even comes down to it. Like anything, do your own research and draft a good TOS for your site. And, at the same time, using TOR is not illegal itself (but could be in some countries), but can result in illegal activity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace) Read TOR's own legal FAQ: https://www.torproject.org/eff/tor-legal-faq.html.en
As stated in the answer to What is considered &quot;public&quot; in the context of taking videos or audio recordings?; if either of the participants is in Australia than unless all parties have given consent then the recording is illegal. Notwithstanding its legality, property in the recording vests in the person who made it. There is no law against him keeping it. There is no law against him publishing it unless the material contained is offensive, hate speech or defamatory (see Customer feedback gathering in Australia).
I'm not sure it makes sense to talk about having "jurisdiction" over an IP address, for the purposes you're discussing. If you wanted to sue the IP address itself--something that is possible under limited circumstances--then you might need to locate it for jurisdictional purposes. But I don't think that's what you're talking about. You're talking about taking civil or criminal action against the people who are using the IP address to commit crimes. What matters, in that case, is not a theoretical legal question about the location of an IP address. It's questions like: where do these people live? Where do the people downloading the illegal content live? Where are the physical servers located? ("In the cloud" is not an answer--there are physical servers somewhere making up that cloud). For jurisdictional purposes, the chair they're sitting in when they upload the illegal data, and the location of the AC power outlet the physical server is plugged into, are as important as, if not more important than, the metaphysical "location" of the IP address of the server.
This is wire fraud and punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Whoever, having devised or intending to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises, transmits or causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio, or television communication in interstate or foreign commerce, any writings, signs, signals, pictures, or sounds for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. It is not relevant that the victims of this fraud are people who support a cause that the US government opposes. Nor is it relevant what your friend chooses to do with the ill-gotten money. It is still just as illegal. Whether your friend would be prosecuted would be at the discretion of federal prosecutors, and political motivations could come into play. That is beyond the scope of Law.SE to address. What is certain is that he could be prosecuted. Giving information to the FBI probably won't help, as from your description, the victims of this fraud aren't doing anything illegal. &quot;Donating money to support Russia&quot;, while vague, does not sound like it violates any of the current sanctions.
Some jurisdictions have laws which make it illegal to create a software which is intended to commit crimes (usually computer-related crimes). For example, the German criminal law §202c StGB makes it illegal to create (or sell, convey, etc.) a program which has the purpose to commit crimes against the previous paragraphs 202a (stealing data) or 202b (intercepting data). The constitutional court later clarified that this law is only to be used against programs which serve no other purpose than to commit crimes and not against &quot;dual use&quot; tools which can also be used for legitimate purposes. So if one were accused of committing the crime of creating such a program, then a possible defense strategy could be to convince the court that they never intended for their program to be used to commit crimes.
Is it illegal to ask a company for money in exchange for information on a bug in their software/website? That in itself is legal. Indeed, the company would incur unjust enrichment if it coerced you to disclose your discovery for free. Only if you threatened the company to divulge to others your discovery unless the company pays you, it would be illegal and trigger charges such as extortion (likewise, legislations outlaw the unjustified delivery of programs or instructions for hacking a software/network/etc., although this goes beyond your actual question). Can the company take legal action against me? That seems doubtful, futile, and it could backfire (please note I have not done any research on legal precedents about this). Although the terms and conditions of the website or the End User License Agreement (EULA) of software might prohibit you to reverse engineer (RE)/decompile/etc. the application, anti-RE clauses are unenforceable and the remedies therefor are indeterminate because the sole act of conducting reverse engineering does not subject the company (or third parties) to any losses. The company's decision to take legal action for your discovery could backfire from two standpoints. First, it calls attention to the fact that the software at issue is defective and unsafe. And second, the bug is likely to be detected by someone else anyway, thereby potentially compromising customers' systems.
Any country is free to decide what actions are considered to be crimes, and what crimes are prosecuted depending on whether you perform the action in the country, outside the country, and depending on whether you are a citizen, a resident, both, or neither. They can also decide what are accepted defences in court and which are not. Any other country is free to decide under which circumstances they will ever extradite someone to that first country. Now you have to check the laws of the individual countries.