"The next world war could happen in cyberspace and that would be a catastrophe. We have to make sure that all countries understand that in that war, there is no such thing as a superpower," Hamadoun Toure said.

"Loss of vital networks would quickly cripple any nation, and none is immune to cyberattack," added the secretary-general of the International Telecommunications Union during the ITU's Telecom World 2009 fair in Geneva.

Toure said countries have become "critically dependent" on technology for commerce, finance, health care, emergency services and food distribution.

"The best way to win a war is to avoid it in the first place," he stressed.

As the Internet becomes more linked with daily lives, cyberattacks and crimes have also increased in frequency, experts said.

Such attacks include the use of "phishing" tools to get hold of passwords to commit fraud, or attempts by hackers to bring down secure networks.

Individual countries have started to respond by bolstering their defences.

US Secretary for Homeland Security Janet Napolitano said Thursday that she has received the green light to hire up to 1,000 cybersecurity experts to ramp up the United States' defenses against cyber threats.

South Korea has also announced plans to train 3,000 "cyber sheriffs" by next year to protect businesses after a spate of attacks on state and private websites.

Warning of the magnitude of cybercrimes and attacks, Carlos Solari, Alcatel-Lucent's vice-president on central quality, security and reliability, told a forum here that breaches in e-commerce are now already running to "hundreds of billions."

But one of the most prominent victims in recent years has been the small Baltic state of Estonia, which has staked some of its post Cold War development on new technology.

In 2007 a spate of cyber attacks forced the closure of government websites and disrupted leading businesses.

Estonian Minister for Economic Affairs and Communications Juhan Parts said in Geneva that "adequate international cooperation" was essential.

"Because if something happens on cyberspace... it's a border crossing issue. We have to have horizontal cooperation globally," he added.

To this end, several countries have joined forces in the International Multilateral Partnership against Cyber Threats (IMPACT), set up this year to "proactively track and defend against cyberthreats."

Some 37 ITU member states have signed up, while another 15 nations are holding advanced discussions, said the ITU.

Experts say that a major problem is that the current software and web infrastructure has the same weaknesses as those produced two decades ago.

"The real problem is that we're putting on the market software that is as vulnerable as it was 20 years ago," said Cristine Hoepers, general manager at Brazilian National Computer Emergency Response Team.

"If you see the vulnerabilities that are being exploited today, they are still the same," she underlined.

She suggested that professionals needed to be trained to "design something more resilient."

"Universities are not teaching students to think about that. We need to change the workforce, we need to go to the universities..., we need to start educating our professionals," she said.

Pointing out the infrastructure weakness, Carlos Moreira, who founded and runs the Swiss information security firm Wisekey, said legislation is needed to bring cybersecurity up to international standards.

earlier related report
Hackers hook Web email users with "phishing" scams
Google and Yahoo! on Tuesday joined a growing roster of Web-based email service providers with users duped by hackers into betraying passwords to accounts.

A day after Microsoft blocked access to thousands of Hotmail accounts in response to hackers plundering password information and posting it online, the list of victims was growing to include users of an array of email services.

"We recently became aware of a phishing scheme through which hackers gained user credentials for Web-based mail accounts including a small number of Gmail accounts," Google said in response to an AFP inquiry.

"As soon as we learned of the attack, we forced password resets on the affected accounts. We will continue to force password resets on additional accounts if we become aware of them."

Cyber-crooks evidently used "phishing" tactics to trick users of free Web-based email service into revealing account and access information.

"We are aware that a limited number of Yahoo! IDs may have been made public," Yahoo! said in a statement to AFP. "Online scams and phishing attacks are an ongoing and industry-wide issue."

Time Warner subsidiary AOL, in response to an AFP inquiry, said it is "closely monitoring the situation."

"Our guidance to users is to keep your wits about you: do not click on live links, or insert any details into input fields in emails, pop-ups or Web pages if you are not sure where they come from."

Microsoft said Monday that it learned of the latest problem during the weekend after Hotmail account information of "several thousand" users, many of them reportedly in Europe, was posted at a website.

The unconfirmed list of Hotmail accounts compromised by "phishing" has grown into the tens of thousands.

"We are aware that some Windows Live Hotmail customers' credentials were acquired illegally by a phishing scheme and exposed on a website," Microsoft said. "We have taken measures to block access to all of the accounts that were exposed and have resources in place to help those users reclaim their accounts."

Phishing is an Internet bane and involves using what hackers refer to as "social engineering" to trick people into revealing information online or downloading malicious software onto computers.

Phishing tactics include sending people tainted email attachments that promise enticing content such as sexy photos of celebrities and luring people to bogus log-in pages that are convincing replicas of legitimate websites.

Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo! stressed that hackers did not breach their databases, but rather email users were conned into revealing information.

"Phishing is an industry-wide problem... exercise extreme caution when opening unsolicited attachments and links from both known and unknown sources, and install and regularly update anti-virus software," Microsoft said.

Google advises Gmail users not to "click through" on warnings browsers may raise about certificates nor sign in at Web addresses that don't start with google.com/accounts.

Web-based email users who suspect their accounts have been compromised should change passwords and check to make certain any secondary email or texting options in accounts have not been changed.

"We encourage users to be very careful when asked to share their personal information," Google said.

The email service providers urged people to visit pages at their websites with advice and tools for protecting accounts.

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