Around 100 people are responsible for worldwide cybercrime and measures will have to be taken soon to deal with them, according to the head of Europol's Cybercrime Centre.
In an interview on BBC's Tech Tent radio programme, Troels Oertling pointed out that "a rather limited group of good programmers were responsible for most cybercrime around the world.
"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. We can still cope but the criminals have more resources and they do not have obstacle."
"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," he added.
According to Oertling, the tools for cybercrime are so readily available that to be a cybercrminal is "easy". The most pressing problem for police is that cybercrime is essentially a borderless activity, he says.
"You don't have to be an expert because you just download the programs that you want to use.
"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.
Most of the criminals operated from within Russia and while relationships with Russian law enforcement weren't great, it was "improving".
People should protect personal information as a priority, he said, adding: "What I think you should be afraid of is the stealing of your private, sensitive information - your inbox credentials, your Facebook account.
"If they know a bit about you they can reset your Google accounts, your Apple accounts. Then they simply take over your life."
