Embattled Baltic country Estonia has called for UN Member states to make a concerted effort in the battle against cyber-crime and cyber-terrorism, starting with an international convention on the emerging issue, reports the UN News Centre.

Speaking to the General Assembly on Tuesday evening, Estonia’s President Toomas Hendrik Ilves called for the development of a globally negotiated and comprehensive law with which to govern cyber-space. Estonia’s own experience of cyber-warfare, which occurred in late April and early May at the hands of a loose federation of politically motivated cyber-activists, served to starkly underline the urgency of the cyber-assault issue, he argued.

Many of the country’s private and public networks were crippled due to a flood of unsolicited traffic, believed to have been facilitated by the use of an attack application that was downloaded by groups across the globe.

President Ilves said that the asynchronous nature of such cyber-attacks, in which the attacking forces are networked and therefore vastly superior, in terms of scale and strength, to their target, makes international co-operation on the subject crucial. “They make it possible to paralyze a society, with limited means, and at a distance. In the future, cyber attacks may in the hands of criminals or terrorists become a considerably more widespread and dangerous weapon than they are at present,” he said.

The true severity of the cyber threat continues to be under-estimated because past cyber-assaults have not been known to result in the loss of life, he added.

In an unusually bold condemnation of the subject, often regarded as a peripheral area of criminal concern by law-enforcement, Mr Ilves argued further that cyber-crime should be considered as dangerous and iniquitous as physical terrorism and human trafficking, and denounced accordingly.