As Lord Carter's Digital Britain report tries to promote an all-digital world, there is also a darker opportunity for less-than-honest people to enrich themselves through the digital economy. To combat the growing threat of cyber crime, new approaches are needed. So exactly how will the police address the thorny problem of internet crime and cyber criminals in the future?

At a roundtable hosted by business and technology consultants Unisys, six of the UK's leading experts from academia and the front line of public law enforcement agencies debated the problem of cyber crime, and how and where the UK needs to deploy resources to address the threat.

David Wall, professor of criminal justice and IT at Leeds University, outlined the historical path to the current cyber crime epidemic. First, discrete mainframe systems created an opportunity for insider hacking and fraud; the move to dial-in modems created opportunities for hacking out of so-called " phone freaking". Finally, broadband development led to the creation of botnets. The next phase of cyber crime, said Wall, "will come out of the ambient technologies, and we need to look at the convergences and the knock-on effects that could happen when these technologies mature."

National Police Improvement Agency (NPIA) detective superintendent John Mooney insisted that police must be attuned to the next generation of threats before it is too late. "From a policing perspective, we always seem to be playing catch-up," he said.

One of the major successes in fighting cyber crime was Operation Cathedral, which targeted an international child pornography ring, the so-called Wonderland Group. But that success highlights one of the difficulties facing the crime fighter: success encourages criminals to modify their behaviour. As Birmingham City University's professor of criminology David Wilson noted: cyber criminals are "already using net-enabled mobile phones and peer-to-peer systems, and won't leave the kind of trace they used to leave on their systems."

A further difficulty for police is that traditional forces were set up to deal with local crime, where incidents took place in the real world. "The vast majority of police forces are still mainly dealing with crimes such as car robberies and simple theft," said John Vine, independent chief inspector at the UK Border Agency.

This creates a problem for forces to "get a proper balance which acknowledges the need for delivery of local policing services, while addressing cyber crime, " said Ian Readhead, director of information at the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo).

Furthermore, the fight against cyber crime was being hamstrung by a failure to collect proper data on its prevalence, said Peter Sommer, visiting professor at the London School of Economics. The Crown Prosecution Service rarely charges under the Computer Misuse Act, preferring to use other fraud-related laws, or child protection legislation.

Better information collection and sharing would also help improve the effectiveness of policing cyber crime, said NPIA's Mooney. "We need a much better ability to share information with each other. We've got to the first stages of that with the police national database, and there's the Information Systems Improvement Strategy programme," he said.

Another problem highlighted by the UK Border Agency's Vine was that the debate on cyber crime needs to be concentrated on more than just "intra-police boundaries ". "There are 9,000 warranted officers working for the UK Border Agency now, and there is a much higher need for organisations to share intelligence," said Vine.

"We need to get away from bespoke applications, which would help people share information. We keep talking about this, but we need to make greater progress in dealing with it," he added.

ACPO's Read said that because of the pressure on finance, developing bespoke applications through which information will be shared wouldn't happen as much. "We'll be developing proven, commercial ones off the shelf."

"We need to see how we can converge and have open systems, perhaps building first on regional and then national applications, which are coherent and financially affordable," he added.