There are only "around 100" cybercriminal kingpins behind global cybercrime, according to the head of Europol's Cybercrime Centre, Troels Oerting.
Speaking to the BBC's Tech Tent radio show, Oerting said that law enforcers needed to target the "rather limited group of good programmers."
"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. 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.