Today's report on web security from the House of Lords Science and Technology committee contains many nuggets of interesting information - not least that most Distributed Denial of Service attacks in the US are believed to be state sponsored rather than organised by criminals bent on blackmail.

Russia, or at least someone in Russia, was believed to have launched a DDoS attack on Estonia following a row a few weeks back about war graves. But which states would be attacking US businesses, and to what purpose?

Lord Broers, chair of the House of Lords committee that produced the report, said little to elucidate the matter at today's press conference, though it appeared that the information came from conversations with US experts.

But he said: "It is clear that we are witnessing the emergence of a new era  of what might be called cyberwarfare."

Verisign had told the committee that DDoS attacks at peak were now increasing internet traffic 170-fold, a figure expected to increase 500-fold by 2010

Lord Broers said other web crime was also astonishing in scale, with credit-card numbers on sale in chat channels for as little as a dollar apiece.