Cybercrime will continue to escalate despite initiatives to stamp it out unless sentencing policy is toughened and businesses adopt a more proactive approach to taking perpetrators to court, a leading solicitor in the field has warned.

Steven Philippsohn, chairman of the Fraud Advisory Panel's cybercrime working party and partner with City-based Philippsohn Crawfords Berwald, spoke out after the Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir David Calvert-Smith, told a Crown Prosecution Service conference on cybercrime that its hi-tech crime strategy was reaping dividends.

The strategy has seen 70 prosecutors specially trained in tackling cyber criminals.

Sir David said the initiative meant that there were now national specialists with the expertise to prosecute cases.

The conference took place in the same week that the Home Office backed research by the US SysAdmin, Audit, Network, Security Institute into the top 20 Internet security weaknesses.

The partnership sees the UK's National Security Co-ordination Centre lending its skills to identify where security falls down and how the problems can be remedied.

However, Mr Philippsohn argued that although there were enough legal mechanisms to bring cyber criminals to justice, the problem would not go away without adequate sentencing.

'You can get 14 years for a bank robbery, but if you commit a credit card fraud on the Internet you will get two years maximum,' he said.

He added that perpetrators were getting away because companies did not want the bad publicity associated with either criminal or civil litigation, which could damage the reputation of lucrative on-line trading.

'Corporations are just not taking the right action,' he said.

'They should be seeking to freeze the assets so they can recover what has been stolen from them.'

Paula Rohan