Mohd Amin Noor, chairman, International Multilateral Partnership Against Cyber Threats (IMPACT) said: “We are encouraging all 191 member nations to enact laws covering cybercrime, and to ensure that it functions across borders. It's of course vital that these laws are inter-operable. The UN cybercrime convention has only been ratified by 30 countries, so there's plenty of work to do! However, we're not in a position to dictate to any sovereign nation, so it's a question of giving advice where we can. For example, we are currently very active in Africa and the Middle East, where the capacity is huge, but perhaps there is a concern that protection is low.”

During the 2009 World Economic Forum in Davos, delegates called for a new system to tackle the rise in digital crime, claiming online theft costs the global economy US$1 trillion a year. Noor believes that although the current situation is grave, there is hope if the international community continues taking collective enforcement steps. Recent announcements that the US, Russia and UN are deep in talks aimed at strengthening online security could be seen as evidence of a genuine policy shift. “It’s important to remember that the internet is a relatively new invention – the Vienna convention, for example, took many years to come to fruition. It’s vital to gain critical mass – there is a definite herd mentality in these matters”, said Noor.

Raimund Genes, CTO Trend Micro agreed: "It's vital that global legislation links together to prevent safe havens for criminals forming. However, politicians need to take a more urgent approach. The EU has been mulling a series of regulations (such as data breach legislation) for years, but little can be acheived without political will. ISP's also need to begin delivering clean water out of their taps - they need to prefilter spam by default. If they are not willing to do this, they need to be forced to do it by governments." The IMPACT alliance will complete rollout of its online threat early-warning system across 84 of 191 member countries by Q1 next year, according to the organisation. Noor continued: “We'll have rolled out to 41 members in a couple of months, so hope to complete rollout to all 191 members very soon. We can then concentrate on providing education, training and advice on legislative matters.”

IMPACT is a politically neutral global partnership against cyber threats, based in Cyberjaya,
Malaysia. Its Global Response Centre is designed to provide a real-time aggregated early warning system, including global trends and classified intelligence traffic. The International Telecommunications Union also recently released a draft toolkit for cybercrime legislation in April 2009 which aims to provide a framework for developing countries to create effective global laws.