Cybercrime is becoming one of the greatest threats to the safety and stability of the Internet. While the first Internet hackers were harmless tech geeks and experimenters curious to test the limits of a nascent medium, today's hackers are sophisticated cybercrooks who plot and execute alarming e-scams.

Electronic crime is spreading so rapidly, in fact, that experts must constantly create new jargon to describe all the fraudulent activity. Daily news stories report on spam, spyware, scumware, phishing, pharming and a host of other security breaches that compromise sensitive data and threaten to bilk millions from unsuspecting Web users.

Moreover, the problem has intensified in recent years. The relatively few, uncomplicated viruses of last decade are now torrents of fast-evolving, multifaceted viruses. The small-time credit-card fraud of the '90s is today's international credit-card racketeering and ID fraud.

According to some analysts, the Internet may now be entering a golden age of criminal invention. Due to the Net's open architecture, nearly every classic scam ever devised can be digitized and foisted on unsuspecting rubes. And unfortunately for nearly a billion Web users, experts predict that true Internet safety may be years off into the future.