Microsoft wants to be the privatized police force for the internet world. That much was evident from the software giant’s Thursday announcement, where the company revealed that it had instituted a new Cybercrime Center in its Redmond, Washington headquarters. According to an article published by ZDnet, the new division will go against all manner of internet technology-based crimes, from the spread of Malware to the proliferation of botnets, and from intellectual property theft to online child abuse.

According to Microsoft’s new landing page for its Cybercrime Center – appropriately titled “Digital Detectives” – the company’s venture into privatized internet security has been a long time coming. Richard Boscovich, the assistant general counsel for the Digital Crimes Unit at Microsoft, got the ball rolling after he came aboard with the Microsoft corporation in 2008. One of his first acts with the DCU was to go to war with a spambot called Rustock, which was infecting somewhere in the neighborhood of 2.5 million computers a day. Boscovich’s victory gave him a taste for fighting cybercrime on the global scale.

Last year, Microsoft faced an even bigger adversary in the form of Citadel, a dangerous identity theft and financial fraud botnet that infected over 500 million computers and stole half a billion dollars by sneakily acquiring passwords, Social Security numbers, and other sensitive information belonging to innumerable internet users – most of them scattered throughout Europe or North America. Microsoft, with some outside assistance, was able to reclaim most of the infected computers.

While the half a billion dollars stolen by Citadel seems like a massive number on a paper, it’s no more than a fraction of the annual global cost of all cybercrime. Microsoft estimates that cybercrime costs the global economy $500 million each year, and that 50 percent of online adults around the world have been the victim of some sort of internet offense.

Ostensibly, Microsoft’s Cybercrime Center is being put into place to bring those numbers down and minimize the damage. The new division seeks to battle any and all varieties of cybercrime and aspires to make the internet safer for all users, from businesses to academic organizations to government agencies.

Though the federal government does have its own cybercrime divisions, it has stated before that cybercrime has now become the sort of sprawling national security issue that will demand collaboration to solve. Microsoft, with its wealth of resources and its intimate knowledge with the internet world, may just be the exact partner the government has been looking for to bring down cybercrime once and for all.