With transnational cyberspace crimes on the rise, cyber security experts at home and abroad have once again called to reinforce global cooperation in an effort to crack down on such crimes.

“Cyber crimes have become more transnational in recent years. Global cooperation is now urgent and necessary due to the complexity and urgency of the crimes,” noted Zhong Zhong, deputy head of the Cyber Security Protection Bureau under China’s Ministry of Public Security. Zhong said that China has built an effective cooperation framework with multiple countries, including the U.S. and Russia, to tackle cyber crimes across all fields.

China’s ongoing anti-cyber crime campaign was launched in April. Targeting personal information leaks, the campaign has so far bagged over 1,900 suspects and discovered more than 23 billion instances of leaked personal information, according to Zhong.

Zhong made his remarks at the 2016 China Internet Security Conference, which was jointly held on Aug. 16 in Beijing by IT company Qihoo 360, the Internet Society of China (ISC) and the Cyber Security Association of China.

“Open cooperation is one of the key development directions of the global cyber security industry … Cyberspace, similar to a virtual society, is prone to espionage, attack and other crimes. This is a global issue, and no country can exclude itself from the problem,” said Wu Hequan, director-general of the ISC and also an academician with the Chinese Academy of Engineering, at the opening ceremony of the conference.

Retired U.S. Army Major General John Davis, who now works as vice president and federal chief of security at Palo Alto Networks, also called for global cooperation in an era of growing interdependency and connectivity.

Davis said at the conference that global cooperation can be built step by step through increased transparency, trust and teamwork, and that cyber threats in the modern age should be defended in a more proactive, automated way. Davis expressed his belief that it is time for the construction of a formal platform to prevent cyber crimes, which will be an improvement over previous techniques for detection and response. Davis also noted that such an undertaking should not only be carried out by governments, but should also involve private companies.

Echoing Davis, Qi Xiangdong, president of Qihoo 360, noted that a sound basis for cooperation has been set after years of developing big data and threat intelligence.

“Many industry practitioners have called for detection to be more integrated,” Qi said.