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It is possible that the RBN instigated the attacks on Estonia but highly unlikely. More probably it was either paid to launch them or the authorities leaned on them to participate in this act of patriotism. This connection between a complex of St Petersburg-based Internet Service Providers that specialised in criminal activity and the cyber attack on Estonia highlights one of the greatest conundrums at the heart of computer crime and computer security.

There are three main 'threats' on the Internet, each manifesting themselves in a variety of guises. First, there is cybercrime. In its most basic form, cybercrime consists of 'carding', the theft and cloning of credit card data for financial gain. Beyond carding, there are all manner of other scams. One of the most lucrative, for example, is called 'scareware', which was perfected by a Ukrainian-based company called Innovative Marketing. IM employed dozens of young people in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, most of whom believed they were involved in a start-up company that was selling legitimate security products. Except they weren't.

The company was sending out rogue adware, which, once installed on an individual's computer, would trigger a pop-up on the browser warning the user that their machine had been compromised by a virus. The only way, the advert explained, to rid their computer of the electronic critters now crawling all over their hard disk and RAM was to click on a link and purchase 'Malware Destroyer 2009', to name but one of their countless products.

Once you had downloaded Malware Destroyer (for €40), IM would instruct you to remove your existing anti-virus system, such as Norton, and install their product. Once installed, however, it did precisely nothing - it was an empty piece of software, although now of course you were open to infection by any passing virus and you had paid for that dubious privilege.

A researcher for McAfee in Hamburg, Dirk Kolberg, began to monitor this operation. He followed the scareware back to its source in East Asia and found that the administrator of IM's servers had left some ports wide open, so Kolberg was at liberty to wander into the server and peruse it at will. What he uncovered was quite breathtaking. Innovative Marketing was making so much money that it had established three call centres - one for English speakers, one for German and one for