Cyber criminals who engage in internet fraud, blackmail and money laundering are provide safe havens by the Russian and Chinese governments and are given political cover as well as refuse to co-operate with foreign law enforcement bodies for reputation and intelligence reasons, according to the annual Virtual Criminology report.

The annual Virtual Criminology Report by online security software developer McAfee examines the emerging global cyber security threats and is made up of interviews with senior employees and input from global organisations such as the Serious Organised Crime Agency, the United Nations, NATO, SOCA and experts from leading groups and universities.

The report found that a number of countries were giving ''political cover'' to cyber criminals against attempts at prosecution by other nations and the main cyber-kingpins remain scot free, while minor lackeys are caught and prosecuted.

Russia and China are the main culprits protecting these criminals engaged in cyber crimes operating in their countries and actively help them to evade international prosecution while Brazil is one among the top three countries hosting zombie machines and botnets.

According to the report, many governments and allied groups were using the Internet for cyber spying and cyberattacks on national infrastructure network systems such as electricity, air traffic control, financial markets and government computer networks and 120 countries use the Internet for Web espionage operations.

Many of these attacks originate from China, and the Chinese government had earlier gone public saying that they are involved in activities of cyber-espionage although the Chinese Embassy in London recently said that all these allegations are not new and China has been accused on different occasions in the past, but every time the international community has not produced any evidence.

The report found that there was growing evidence of ''cyber espionage'', with countries organizing co-ordinating internet attacks on other countries and India and Belgium are among the latest countries to have complained that its government sites had come under web attacks, which have originated from China.

There was also evidence of Russia having carried out state-sponsored cyber warfare in its latest but short war against Georgia by attacking government computer networks.

NATO intelligence agencies, believe the attack on Estonia, which disrupted government, news and bank servers for several weeks, was carried out by hackers and traditional protective measures were not enough to protect against the attacks on Estonia's critical national infrastructure.

Botnets unsurprisingly were used but the complexity and coordination seen was new as there were a series of attacks with careful timing using different techniques and specific targets. The attackers stopped deliberately rather than being shut down.

Cyber attacks have in the recent past become more sophisticated, designed to specifically slip evade government cyber defences and have progressed from initial curiosity probes to well-funded and well organised operations for political, military, economic and technical espionage.

The report has also warned that cyber terrorism has become a real threat and in the near future it will be powerful enough to launch attacks that will damage and destroy critical national infrastructure, like a country's national grid, gas and water supplies, and bank payment systems.

The Virtual Criminology report, also found that the volume of internet viruses, one of the web criminal's main weapon, has almost tripled in the last year with a majority of them trying to solicit or steal money through fake e-mails supposedly to be originating from banks, and innocent internet users being tempted by ''get rich quick'' schemes.

There have been several high profile 'vishing' attacks and 'phreaking', which is hacking into telephone networks to make long distance phone calls in Japan and 50 per cent of all data breaches have been via peer-to-peer software.

Cyber criminals will now look at indigenous ways to exploit the popularity of applications on social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, the report said.