BUCHAREST/LONDON (Reuters) - Fifteen years behind bars for a crime that took but 15 minutes to execute.

This is the maximum prison sentence facing 24-year-old Romanian Dan Dumitru Ciobanu, suspected by authorities of developing the low-grade Internet worm "Blaster.F" that security experts suspect took him maybe a quarter of an hour to write.

The penalty once again has stoked the debate about appropriate sentencing for a crime that until recently was dismissed by law enforcement officers as a relatively benign prank by tuned-in teenagers trying to prove a point.

But with a wave of increasingly strong Internet bugs, including last month's original Blaster worm and the Sobig.F virus, inflicting billions of dollars in damage, a zero-tolerance sentiment has begun to emerge.

In Romania, a person found guilty of the new cybercrime law, which covers online fraud, hacking and virus-writing, faces a sentence of three to 15 years, more than twice the maximum sentence for rape.

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