DHAKA: There are only "around 100" cybercriminal kingpins behind global cybercrime, according to the head of Europol's Cybercrime Centre.

Speaking to the BBC's Tech Tent radio show, 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.

Although, he added, fighting cybercrime remained an uphill battle.

"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, he told the BBC.

"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 scare me a bit," he said

The majority of the cybercrime "kingpins" were located in the Russian-speaking world, he said.

Relationships with Russian law enforcers have not always been good but were "improving". He revealed that he had recently been on a trip to Moscow to discuss four big cybercrime cases and was hopeful that arrests and jail sentences would follow.

Mr Oerting described how Russian-speaking criminal gangs were creating and testing malware and then selling it as a service in online forums.

"Then it is downloaded by all kinds of criminals, from Eastern Europe, Europe, Africa and America," he said.

This commercialisation of cybercrime is making his job harder.

"It is so easy to be a cybercriminal. You don't have to be a cyber-expert because you just download the programs that you want to use."

BDST: 2042 HRS, OCT 13, 2014