Malware has become an increasing concern, not just for users and companies, but as President Obama said, one of the larger threats to the United States economy. Dennis Fisher says experts at companies such as Microsoft, Google and others, have been trying to make life more difficult for the attackers.

Microsoft has its Digital Crimes Unit, a small group of engineers, security experts and lawyers who spend their days tracking botnet operators, malware writers and helping law enforcement agencies around the world identify and find them.

“The bad guys are getting better at what they do, and we want to be a force-multiplier for good. Our job is not law enforcement. Our goal is to transform this fight to really disrupt and destroy the way cybercriminals operate,” said T.J. Campana, director of security at the DCU.

The biggest target thus far for the DCU team has been the botnet problem. “Botnets are the backbone of the modern cybercriminal,” he said. “We’re severing the connection between the harmed customer and the bad guys. We’ve had court orders to go in and rip the servers out of the data centers. It doesn’t get any cooler than that. But it’s an extraordinarily high burden of proof to be able to do that.”

“The cost of entry into cybercrime is very low and the profits are high. We want to increase the cost of the bad guys getting into the cybercrime business,” he said. “And if they do get in, we want to decrease their ability to make money. We want to demotivate this kind of activity.”

“I want to get to a place where the bad guy launches a new attack, and within a couple of minutes we can respond and get a message to victims,” he said. “I want that identification, notification and remediation happening as quickly as possible.”