Council of Europe report highlights the exponential growth in cybercrime worldwide

Summary of the report

Cybercrime is one of the fastest-growing types of crime worldwide: in Germany, for instance, computer crime has considerably increased in the last fifteen years. The report by the German Professor, Ulrich Sieber, from the Max Planck Institute in Freiburg, which will be presented at the opening of the Council of Europe’s International Conference on the Challenge of Cybercrime, aims to outline a type of crime which takes on many different forms that are not yet widely recognised.

Official statistics often do not list the crimes concerned separately, and they are not always covered by legislation.

Some data collected from different souces reveal the gravity of a problem that affects both individuals and companies, as well as public authorities, which have become the targets of organised crime networks. Children are the most vulnerable victims according to the report, which refers to studies putting the annual market in child pornography on the Internet at almost 20 billion dollars, adding that paedophile images make up almost a quarter of the images downloaded from the Internet..

Over the first eight months in 2004, there has been significant growth worldwide in attempts to fraudulently obtain Internet users' personal data or bank details. According to some sources, the number of racist and hate-speech sites has increased by 300% in four years. According to a survey conducted in Council of Europe member countries in 2003, pirated copies make up 91% of the software used in Ukraine , 87% in Russia , 73% in Romania and 27% in Austria and Sweden.

Businesses are also vulnerable to attacks by viruses, worms and Trojan horses. Two out of three American companies claim to have been affected by them. According to the report, the nature of the offences on the Internet has "changed profoundly" since the early days of the web, when they were mainly confined to infringements of privacy. Today, the threats are extremely varied, ranging from espionage to sabotage, through spam, piracy, incitement to hatred or racism, paedophilia and the violation of personal data, etc.

Ulrich Sieber underlines just how unsuited traditional legal systems are for dealing with this new type of crime. They are too slow, have difficulty gathering the extremely complex kinds of evidence found in the cases in question, and are often held back by borders in the face of a global medium. In Professor Sieber's words, it would be a serious mistake to regard cybercrime as being a threat solely at European level: it involves global threats, which demand global responses.