The laws of most countries do little to deter crime in cyberspace, according to a study by a firm that runs a United Nations-backed network of Internet policy officials.
Thirty-three of 52 nations surveyed had not yet updated their criminal codes to deal with any offence tied to the use of computers, according to McConnell International, the Washington consulting company that carried out the study.
Ten had enacted legislation to address five or fewer of the 10 types of offences at issue, while nine said they were prepared to prosecute six types of offences or more.
The survey showed that United States laws covered nine of the 10 crimes. Only the Philippines, where a devastating recent computer virus originated, had enacted laws to cover all 10 types of crimes.
The offences covered by the survey were data-related crimes, including interception, modification and theft; network tampering, including interference and sabotage; crimes of access, including hacking and virus distribution; and computer-associated crimes such as aiding and abetting cyber criminals, computer fraud and computer forgery.
Extending the rule of law into cyberspace is widely considered as critical for electronic commerce to reach its full potential in a highly networked world.
"In cyberspace, archaic laws often make crime and punishment rather distant relatives," Mr Bruce McConnell, the report's principal author and company president, said in an interview.
The survey was released formally at a panel discussion Thursday addressing moves in Europe towards the first treaty aimed at building a uniform framework for national cyber crime laws.
Last week, the United States endorsed the gist of the proposed cyber crime pact drafted by the Council of Europe, which hopes to wrap up the drafting process this month after more than a decade of work.
"Left unchallenged, computer crime poses a serious threat to the health and safety of our citizens, and may stifle the Internet's power as a tool to communicate, engage in commerce and expand people's educational opportunities around the globe," the US Justice Department said on December 1st in a posting on its website, http://www.cyber crime.gov.
For the survey, McConnell queried Internet policy officials from Albania to Zimbabwe on the network he runs for the UN working group on informatics, an hoc panel under the Economic and Social Council.
The study began after the Philippines, citing inadequate laws, dropped charges in August against the alleged perpetrator of the "Love Bug" virus that jammed electronic mail networks in May. Damages from that incident were estimated in the billions of dollars, including those from hard-hit companies like Ford Motor Co and Lucent Technologies Inc, whose communications were disrupted.
The Philippines has since distinguished itself as the only nation surveyed to indicate it now has laws on the books to prosecute all 10 types of cyber crime identified in the survey.
Unless crimes were defined in a similar manner across jurisdictions, co-ordinated international law enforcement would remain very difficult, posing serious threats to global information lifelines, the study said.
"In the network world, no island is an island," said Mr McConnell.
The World Information Technology and Services Alliance, a consortium of 41 international information technology associations representing the global IT industry, is to hold a meeting in Belfast on May 31st and June 1st, Jamie Smyth reports.
The World Information Technology and Services Alliance's Infosec Global Summit is expected to attract a large number of cross-industry business executives and international government officials.
The initiative follows a growing number of on-line banking and e-business security breaches as well as hacker attacks on high profile websites including Yahoo! and CNN.
