Only 100 Cybercrime Brains Worldwide, Says Europol Boss

mrspoonsi writes There are only "around 100" cybercriminal kingpins behind global cybercrime, according to the head of Europol's Cybercrime Centre. Speaking to the BBC, Troels Oerting said that law enforcers needed to target the "rather limited group of good programmers". "We roughly know who they are. If we can take them out of the equation then the rest will fall down," he said. "This is not a static number, it will increase unfortunately," he said. "We can still cope but the criminals have more resources and they do not have obstacles. They are driven by greed and profit and they produce malware at a speed that we have difficulties catching up with." The biggest issue facing cybercrime fighters at the moment was the fact that it was borderless. "Criminals no longer come to our countries, they commit their crimes from a distance and because of this I cannot use the normal tools to catch them. "I have to work with countries I am not used to working with and that scares me a bit," he said The majority of the cybercrime "kingpins" were located in the Russian-speaking world, he said.

Comments

Only 100 you say?

[ColdWetDog]

Perhaps 'only' 100 that you know about, but that statement is clearly insane. These attacks aren't just done by some long haired, Dorito fueled teenager with 16 screens and a hot girlfriend. Like everything else these days they're done by teams of people. Somebody good at Windows, somebody good at Cisco routers, someone skilled in social hacks, somebody with access to money.

I don't know why we even bother with these sorts of articles. They guy's credibility is about as good as the average politician.

"It is a tale told by and idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."