Cybercrime Act, unauthorized access to an information system
A citation is an address, not a summary. The first part names the law; what follows narrows it to the exact section, article or paragraph.
In force.
A computer misuse rule binding public and private bodies.
As of 6 September 2026.
What it requires
- Do not access, or attempt to access, all or part of an information system without the operator's authorization, and do not remain fraudulently within one once inside.
- Whether reading a public, unauthenticated page without defeating any access control falls inside this prohibition has not been settled by a reported decision.
If you get it wrong
Criminal exposureYes
Criminal exposure note
Unauthorized access to or fraudulent presence within an information system is punishable by one to two years' imprisonment and a fine of 5 million to 10 million CFA francs (arts. 4-5); theft of information from an information system is punishable by five to ten years' imprisonment and a fine of 3 million to 5 million CFA francs (art. 26), rising to ten to twenty years and 5 million to 10 million CFA francs with an aggravating circumstance (art. 27) or where the system is protected by a secret access code (art. 30).
Penalty structure
Article 4's fine ceiling for unauthorized access to an information system; the Act's related computer-intrusion offenses (arts. 5-10, 26-30) carry their own, higher fine ceilings up to 60 million CFA francs and longer imprisonment terms up to twenty years, described in criminal_exposure_note.
- Rule
- Fixed only
- As of
- 6 September 2026
- Currency
- XOF
- Fixed cap
- 10,000,000
What it reaches
Obligation class
Access restriction
What this law does
Drafted with AI from the cited sources under the direction of UnGovr staff. UnGovr holds editorial responsibility for this page.
Article 4 punishes by one to two years' imprisonment and a fine of 5 million to 10 million CFA francs anyone accessing or attempting to access all or part of an information system, and article 5 separately punishes fraudulently remaining within all or part of an information system on the same terms.
Article 6 punishes hindering or distorting the functioning of an information system, article 7 punishes introducing data into it, and articles 8 to 10 punish intercepting, altering or fabricating computer data, each with escalating imprisonment terms of up to ten years and fines of up to 60 million CFA francs.
Article 26 separately punishes theft of information, defined as fraudulently becoming aware of, copying, or removing the physical medium carrying information within an information system, by five to ten years' imprisonment and a fine of 3 million to 5 million CFA francs, rising to ten to twenty years and 5 million to 10 million CFA francs where an aggravating circumstance listed in article 27 is present, and article 30 raises the minimum to ten years where the system or data was protected by a secret access code.
None of these articles conditions the offense on defeating a technical security measure, so whether they reach a scraper reading a public, unauthenticated page is not addressed by the text.
When LexLint raises it
crawls_webtrains_models
Read the law
Official English-language rendering of Law No. 2013-451 published by ARTCI
(Autorité de Régulation des Télécommunications/TIC de Côte d'Ivoire) the French original circulated on ARTCI's own site is a scanned-image PDF with no extractable text layer, so this rendering, whose translation quality is uneven in places, is the readable copy of the Act, an Internet Archive capture