Bangkok — When mobile phones in the Philippines, Vietnam and China were attacked by a computer virus in the second half of last year, the world's cyber sleuths realised they were up against a new form of cyber crime.

Today, almost 11 months since the "Cabir" virus first began infecting a certain brand of Nokia phones in largely developing countries, the world's cyber-crime detectives are still in the dark about who was behind it.

What's worse is that this virus, which has struck nine countries, including India and the United Arab Emirates, still remains a threat.

"That was the first time mobile phones were attacked by a virus," Gareth Sansom, a cyber crime specialist at Canada's Department of Justice, told IPS. "We still do not have the identity of who wrote that virus."

But for Sansom, there are broader implications arising from the impending threat of "Cabir" damaging more mobile phones. For one, this was the latest example confirming that developing countries are not immune from the latest twists in cyber crime regardless of the size of their information technology (IT) industry.

The reality is that developing countries are becoming more vulnerable to cyber crime than their developed counterparts due to the pace and manner in which their IT culture is growing.

"There are different types of cyber crime that have hit developing countries because of their uniqueness like what happened with the mobile phones," Sansom explained. "Criminals will exploit any vulnerability."

On other occasions, the unprotected computer infrastructure in the developing world has been targeted specifically to serve as a launching pad to attack systems in the developed world. "They have become staging grounds for attacks by cyber criminals," said Sansom. "People designing viruses look for lapses in protecting computer systems in developing countries to exploit."

The Microsoft Windows operating system, used by more than 90 percent of the world's computer users, has been criticised by some computer experts as susceptible to determined hackers, because of the weakness in its basic operating architecture.

Sansom's warning was one among many appeals made here to governments during the Eleventh U.N. Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice, which ends on Monday.

Currently, the developing world accounts for only 4.1 Internet users and 3.3 personal computers per 100 people in its respective region, states research done by the International Telecommunication Union. On the other hand the developed world accounts for 33.3 Internet users and 36.2 personal computers per 100 inhabitants.

Further, a fifth of the people living in the world's developed countries account for 81.9 percent of the world's personal computers, 76.2 percent of the world's Internet users and 97.5 percent of the world's Internet hosts, adds a background note by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

In light of the emerging threats from cyber crime, the United Nations is in the process of negotiating a cyber crime convention, the first of its kind. "The idea of a treaty to regulate cyber crime was mooted by (former U.S. President Bill) Clinton," Palitha Kohona, chief of the U.N. treaty section, said in an interview.

"The intention is to control the misuse of the Internet," he added. "Concerns have been expressed about child pornography on the Internet and using the Internet to spread viruses."

The need for such monitoring measures have grown in intensity due to cyber crime being hard to detect and track down, given its largely transnational nature.

"There are few bilateral and multilateral agreements to address cyber crime in the world," Lee Taehoon, president of the Korean Institute of Criminology, told government delegates during a workshop on 'Measures to Combat Computer-related Crime."

Typical examples of such crimes highlighted in the note circulated by UNODC is the case of two Australians sending out some six to seven million electronic mail messages to addresses in Australia and the United States to influence the value of a U.S. corporation's shares in the NASDAQ stock market.

The National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations, or NASDAQ, is the biggest rival of the New York Stock Exchange.

In China, on the other hand, the Ministry of Public Security has reported that close to 5,000 computer crimes were recorded in 2001, up from 2,900 cyber crimes in 2000 and from 400 in 1999, the background note revealed. "Most offenders were younger people (aged 18-30), and most of the attacks were mounted from Net, or cyber-cafes, with offenders hiding their identities."

Other computer-related crimes include accessing computer codes without authorisation, cracking passwords, credit card fraud and the spread of viruses that have brought business and computer networks to a halt, resulting in damage running into millions of dollars.

"Although back in the 1980s, when the first viruses came out, they were written in the U.S., it is not the case today," said cyber sleuth Sansom. "There have been number of viruses written in Latin America and Asia. They have been written across the digital divide."

For which, "an isolated response will prove futile," he added. "Controlling mechanisms need to be implemented at a number of different levels, with regular updates on the new defences being created to fight cyber crime."