Professor Anderson, who heads up Cambridge University's security engineer department, told a House of Lords committee meeting on security yesterday that European country security agencies — including the police — have no economic incentive to devote scare resources to relatively low-level, high-volume cybercrime.

Reporting on Professor Anderson's presentation, ZDNet's Tom Espiner quoted him as saying that, suppose a criminal in Moscow sends out a million phishing emails, and 1% hits a UK jurisdiction and 15% hit the US. It is, Professor Anderson said, much easier for the UK police to let the FBI do the heavy lifting.

If there were a unified European response, however, then the economics of tackling cybercrime would be more attractive to all concerned, and, presumably — Infosecurity notes — allow UK police to shoulder some of the investigative issues and allied costs.