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Cyber crime deserves tougher sentences and stricter laws

According to one member of Parliament in London, Labour`s Tom Harris, there needs to be specific laws forbidding "denial of service attacks" where floods of emails are used to wreck computer systems. The goal is to get cyber crime treated seriously by the court system of Great Britain.

Harris told Members of Parliament that the internet had changed much since the current laws on hacking and spreading computer viruses were introduced in 1990.

"The media like to imagine that hacking, virus-proliferation and denial-of-service attacks using email are the product of bright but lonely, socially challenged teenagers sitting in their bedrooms," he said. "This is an outdated, inaccurate and, I think, dangerous notion."

"Deliberately flooding email systems with spam and shutting down computer networks poses as immense a threat to the UK`s national security as `conventional` terrorist attacks," Harris said.