Firms reluctant to prosecute hackers

Only a tiny number of hackers are being prosecuted in the UK despite the rising tide of online crime according to latest figures.

The Home Office has revealed that in 2001 there were 25 prosecutions under the Computer Misuse Act with 21 found guilty and eight jailed. The act formed part of a further 58 criminal cases.

Custodial sentences do not seem to have boosted the number of businesses bringing cases, with two-thirds preferring to handle crime in-house according to the National High-Tech Crime Unit.

The big problem is with confidence and trust in the system rather than the law itself, suggests Robert Schifreen, the first hacker to be jailed under the act.

'The main reason why there have been so few prosecutions in the UK is not because of limitations in the Act. It is because the police service doesn't have the manpower to bring enough cases to court. As a result, only the largest or most severe incidents are ever followed up on,' he said.

In 1999 and 2000 there were only 33 prosecutions for offences under the Computer Misuse Act.

Peter Wilson, a partner in leading law firm Tarlo Lyons, agrees: 'The low number of prosecutions since the introduction of the Act is due to two factors: a lack of reporting and a lack of resources.

'Companies are reluctant to report breaches of their systems in order to avoid negative PR, while authorities lack the necessary resources, perhaps because other types of crime have been prioritised over computer crime.'

David Roberts, chief executive of the Corportate IT Forum Tif, said the figures did not reflect the level of the computer crime problem.

' If this number of prosecutions actually reflected the total amount of activity, then you would not see large organisations spending large sums of money on their electronic security,' he said.

The issue of trust and confidence in the law is the subject of a Computing campaign to try to tackle the technical, cultural and political problems of online crime as well as the legal ones.