Just 100 criminal kingpins responsible for world's cyber-crime - Europol

Head of European cyber-crime centre claims Europol 'roughly knows who they are'

Despite the increasing frequency and complexity of cyber threats, there are only 100 underworld kingpins that are responsible for the world's cyber crime.

That's according to the head of Europol's European Cybercrime Centre, Troels Oerting, who told the BBC that most of the world's major cyber crime incidents were down to "a rather limited group of good programmers".

Encouragingly, Oerting said that Europol, which is the EU's law enforcement agency, "roughly knows who they are".

"If we can take them out of the equation the rest will fall down," he said.

But in order to ensure that cyber crime can be thwarted across Europe, Oerting said there was still a long way to go, particularly in improving relationships between nations.

Oerting claimed that Russia is home to many of the alleged kingpins. He suggested that although the kingpins themselves were the intelligence behind much of the most effective malware, many of those that disseminate it had simply bought it online in criminal forums.

"It's downloaded by all kinds of criminals, from Eastern Europe, Europe, Africa and America. It's so easy to be a cyber criminal. You don't have to be a cyber expert because you just download the programs that you want to use," he said.

"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," he added.

But that's not the only worry. Oerting suggested that the number of kingpins will also increase.

"This is not a static number. It will increase, unfortunately. We can still cope but the criminals have more resources and they do not have obstacles," he said.

He warned people to protect their private sensitive information such as email credentials and Facebook account details.

"If [cyber-criminals] know a bit about you then they can reset your Google accounts, your Apple accounts and simply take over your life," he said.