Published in News

Only 100 cybercrime bosses in the world

by on13 October 2014



Europol says they know who they are

There are only "around 100" cybercriminal kingpins behind global cybercrime, according to the head of Europol's Cybercrime Centre and he knows who they are.

Troels Oerting said that law enforcers needed to target the "rather limited group of good programmers” and if they could take them out of the equation then the rest will fall. He said that fighting cybercrime remained an uphill battle.

In comparison with the police, the criminals have more resources and they do not have the same obstacles. 

“They are driven by greed and profit and they produce malware at a speed that we have difficulties catching up with," he said.

One of the biggest problems is that criminals no longer need to travel. They commit their crimes from a distance and normal tools can’t catch them.

"I have to work with countries I am not used to working with and that scares me a bit," Oerting said

The majority of the cybercrime "kingpins" were located in the Russian-speaking world. Russian-speaking criminal gangs were creating and testing malware and then selling it as a service in online forums, Oerting said.

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